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Ted Hughes Author(s): DAVID PORTER Source: The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (September/October 1975), pp. 13-18Published by: American Poetry ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27775040Accessed: 02-01-2016 07:18 UTC

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Departure At Dusk:

The Airport Corridors, The Late Autumn Plane Goodbye friends in your hiding places wearing your coats of skins and looking to the sky. Autumn has disappeared to the south and you are settled into hawthorn thickets growing smaller

holding hands with your sexy girlfriend the night.

Over the ridge, over your eyes caged in branches

enormous black flights of birds are coming in low

crossing the stream just north of you where the dead sheep fade into the soil ?

fade away to bones and thick white coats

and sink into the layers of earth beneath them

where the slow hearts of moles beat

in controlled death down the long corridors of sleep.

Ha! Already I can hear you walking away in my memory like the echos of a lost watch.

The delicate trail fades and disappears like a vapor path across the night sky.

You migrate, you hibernate or you die ?

how can I love you so much when you can't even

understand nature's simplest laws?

No ? Don't you dare wave to me! Goodbye

you ridiculous fast-breathing padded bones

I can no longer bear saying goodbye to.

David Porter pho to by Ma

In the poetry of Ted Hughes we are witnessing the death of a familiar but now increasingly irrelevant aesthetic. Simulta

neously we see emerging in the work of this English poet a new idea of poetry involving an enor

mous acceleration of intake ?

myth, epic, folk cycle, comics, ad

vertising, TV, the other pop disposables

? and aggressively reconciled to the consciousness of a post-literate culture. His ob jective is poetry that is equipped for life.

The old aesthetic, dominated

by the Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, seems in this new

light to have been static, an

elegant urn, or simply diffuse and

self-consciously erudite ("the rose in the steel dust"; "medallions / to forge Achaia"). Theirs was a

passive, vulnerable aesthetic, its

fragility the subject of much of their poetry. Robert Lowell ex tends their assumptions in his

laboriously balanced meditations.

Forty years ago Hart Crane distilled the presiding idea in a gloss on the poem "Chaplin esque": "Poetry, the human

feelings, ' the kitten,' is so

crowded out of the humdrum, mechanized scramble of today that the man who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or him self from annihilation.''

The new poetics of Ted Hughes conceives poems as hard and

September/October 1975

predatory, like killer sharks. The sea pulls everything to pieces, he has written, "except its killers, alert and shapely." Thus poems instinctively must be about the business, Hughes says, of

managing the practical dif ficulties of survival. This radical

conception means two basic

things: poems inhabit the same world as assassinations and must not allow themselves to be made trivial by comparison; poems

make the essential thing happen, they rescue us from inanition. This is their totemic value as the main regenerative acts of the human psyche.

Hughes's mode is no sweet new

style, but rather wily, elemen

tary, and attacking like an animal. It is not the twitches and rustles of "confessional" poets out of university writing classes. Least of all is it like that of his generation of writers in England, whose poems someone has called mournful mouthings over pints of

beer, soiled sheets, and garden implements. Hughes's style is

conglomerate, ravenous, drawing in everything from Old English to shamanism to pop. His imagined poet is a scavenger over all the mishmash of the globed junkyard, hardly the archetypal figure James Joyce saw as the God of

creation, indifferent, paring his

fingernails. The crucial objective in our

wasting culture, according to

Hughes, is immediate: to keep all the sensibilities intact. How, af ter all, could the studied moder nist styles of Eliot and Auden and their followers perceive today the simultaneous meaning of Disney

World, tiger cages, and thalidomide except pretentiously from a great distance and

through the spectacles of books? "When he lay in a doorway and

watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him,,, so Hughes has written of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, "he realized that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die.''

In Ted Hughes's work, ac

cordingly, are early signs of a

deep geological shift under way in

English language poetry. The slide is away from poetry that is

predominantly isolated, in

dividual, inward-turning, and

self-indulgently hallucinatory toward works which, in Hughes's words, are in tune with the rhyth ms of the people in a direct and

dynamic way, that is, toward

poetry that is folk-oriented, radically political. The resulting separation is Hughes's poetics from the old familiar tonalities ex

plains why he is thought to have barbarized the vocation of poet and to have forsaken his humanistic obligations. Ian Hamilton, the English poet and critic, says stiffly that Hughes simply is mistaken.

Yet no poet writing today is more deeply endowed by the

English literary inheritance than

Hughes. To say what others have not yet ventured these days about a new language, a new poet, and a new poetry in deep reconcilement with the consciousness of our age, he involves us not only in his own

poetry and in the microcosm of

England today, but also in

English dialect and in the projec ts of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Keith Douglas, of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, of Yeats and Jung. In addition, he makes an aesthetics out of the lives of beasts.

I. The Present Age The dominant fact of our age,

according to Hughes, is that Western men have lost contact with the raw dream of their

origins. They are partial men, in

capable of mastering the brute

beauty of their lives. Thus

Hughes conceives an exemplary counter-thrusting poetry which, hawk-like, attains the powerfully balanced exertion Hopkins called

mastery. Animals and other creatures are equipped by sinew and instinct for such life. When this happens in poetry it is a mat ter of language. Though in

consistently attained, that is

Hughes 's considerable goal: a

poetic language resourceful

enough to assert itself amid the

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crushing banality and terror which are the terms of our times.

His own language at times

achieves, as he says of

Shakespeare's, the aspect of

being invented in a state of crisis, for a terribly urgent job. Poems from the cycle Crow (1970), for

example, range from lyric to

devotion to street curse, com

pacted as in the poem "A

Horrible Religious Error": When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel

brown, From the hatched atom

With its alibi self twisted around it

Lifting a long neck

And balancing that deaf and mineral

stare

The sphyjix of the final fact

And flexing on that double flameflicker

tongue A syllable like the rustling of the

spheres

God's grimace writhed, a leaf in the

furnace

And man's and woman's knees melted,

they collapsed Their neck-muscles melted, their brows

bumped the ground Their tears evacuated visibly

They whispered ''Your will is our

peace, "

But Crow only peered. Then took a step or two

forward, Grabbed this creature by the slackskin

nape,

Beat the hell out of it, and ate it.

(Crow, 34)

Magnificent images seem

casually expended: "dull gunshot and its after-rale/Among conifers, in rainy twilight." Ex

cruciating junctures of sen

sibility: "Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth." Sud den profundities open out: "crow, a black rainbow/Bent in emp tiness/over emptiness/But flying" ; "stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of the

nothing forest, clouding their

spores, the virus of God." Cartoons cut through dogma in

a poem about how truth kills

everybody: The ankle of a rising, fiery angel

? he

held it Christ's hot pounding heart ? he held

it

The earth shrunk to the size of a hand

grenade And he held it he held it and held it and BANG! He was blasted to nothing. ^

(Crow, 71)

Hughes offers a radical liberation ? in substance,

viewpoint, and voice ? from the

subjective plaints of the con

fessional poets and their tin-pan counterparts. Hughes perceives a

tougher instrument adequate to

the corrosive realities of our age.

Consequently, like Brecht a

generation earlier, he transmits an audacity that is breath

stopping in an age otherwise blan ched to indifference by im

poverishment and brutality. The chronicle of this stub

bornly honest engagement is scattered in his drama, fiction, and criticism in various

periodicals. The major poetry of it is in five important books: The

Hawk in the Rain (1957), Luper

cal (I960), Wodwo (1967), Crow 11970), and Selected Poems 1957 1967(19721

II. The East European Poets

When Hughes reads his poetry in public he leans slightly, as if in to a chronic Yorkshire wind or, better, as if away from the sensed

overhang of a cliff. He once described the rock face that loomed over his Yorkshire

birthplace this way: "Something about the clouds and light, the in clination of the season, or some

overnight strengthening of the

earth, has reared it right over

you, and you feel to be in the mouth of a vast dripping cave, in some hopeless age/' He bends to his reading, head tilted, as if the

light were a slight glare or as if he were in that Yorkshire valley where there shone as he says, "a

slightly disastrous, crumbly, grey light, sunless and yet too clear, like a still from the documentary film of an accident."

The Yorkshire cliff of Hughes's childhood looms for him as the emblem of our present age. It seemed to him raised against a

passage to the south and sym bolic of the life: "while thinking distractedly out to east and west, we valley-dwellers were stuck

looking into the dark hair wall of Scout Rock, as it was called, and the final sensation was of having been trapped." The link is direct from that supposed Yorkshire en

trapment to Hughes 's intuitive

understanding of the political en

trapments enforced since 1945, particularly in East Europe, of the sort Solzhenitsyn has since disclosed in The Gulag Ar

chipelago. With the poets of East

Europe ?

Popa, Holub, Herbert, Milosz, among others ?

Hughes has located explicit terms of the

deprived human situation in our

age: "They have had to live out, in actuality, a vision which for ar

tists elsewhere is a prevailing shape of things but only brokenly glimpsed, through the clutter of our civilized liberal confusion.

They must be reckoned among the purest and most wide awake of living poets."

Long before it was fashionable,

Hughes saw the inescapable prospect: "The Soviet vision of the future," he wrote in the 60's, "does not differ fundamentally from the American one ? both are barren and are now in

creasingly seen to be so." To Hughes, authoritarian sup

pressions have their bloodless

parallels in the withering inanities of Western society. Like

D. H. Lawrence, he loathes civilized abstracting at the price of blooded nature. He decries "the oppressive deadness of

civilization, the spiritless , materialism of it, the stupidity of it." Movies and TV give us con stant but unacknowledged read outs of our morally vacant

familiarity with the monstrous:

shooting somebody through the midriff Was too like striking a match

Too like potting a snooker ball

fCrow, 15)

Hughes's condemnation of civilized stupor brushed even

Sophocles, whose moral

equations and formal finish seem to him not to reveal but to hide the bloody root of Oedipus' suf

fering. It is, he believes, by groping in those pits opened beneath the rhetoric that we

grasp our basic fable and con

sequently devise our salvation. But words from the old lexicon

no longer draw blood. They are no match for Crow in Hughes's surrealization:

Words attacked him with the glottal bomb ?

He wasn'? listening. Words surrounded and over-ran him

with light aspirates ?

He was dozing. Words infiltrated guerilla labials ?

Crow clapped his beak, scratched it.

Words swamped him with consonantal masses ?

Crow took a sip of water and thanked

heaven.

(Crow, 22)

East European poets are exam

ples for us particularly in their rhetorical honesty and incredibly fine monitoring of faint signals. Their helplessness in the cir

cumstances, Hughes says, "has

purged them of rhetoric. They cannot falsify their experience by any hopeful effort to change it. Their poetry is a strategy of

making audible meanings without disturbing the silence, an art of homing in tentatively on

vital scarcely perceptible signals, making no mistakes but with no

hope of finality, continuing to ex

plore. Finally, with delicate

maneuverings, they precipitate out of the world of malicious

negatives a happy positive." The

deadly serious caricature of that commitment is Hughes's folk hero Crow, who is the poet of our

age. After an ordinary murder in the adjoining parking lot, when for someone the trees closed forever:

And the streets closed forever

And the body lay on the gravel

Of the abandoned world

Among abandoned utilities

Exposed to infinity forever

Crow had to start searching for

something to eat.

(Crow, 10)

Survival breeds beauty, ad

versity has its revelations. In

Hughes's world one wants to go on existing. The scramble to sur vive is a kind of street fighting but it yields human definition: "It is the only precious thing, and

designed in accord with the whole Universe. Designed, indeed, by the whole Universe. They (the East European poets) are not the

spoiled brats of civilization disap pointed of impossible and unreal

expectations and deprived of the revelations of necessity ... They have managed to grow up to a view of the unaccommodated

Universe, but it has not made them cynical, they still like it and

keep all their sympathies intact.

They have got back to the simple animal courage of accepting the odds and have rediscovered the frontier."

He has little patience with con

temporaries who retreat into

fashions. He calls his fellow poets to a more difficult role for which the East Europeans are his

paradigms. "They refuse to seil out ... in order to escape with some fragmentary sense, some

abstract badge of self

estrangement, into a popular membership safety." Every man, whether he likes it or not, says

Hughes, is a micro-model of his

nation but it is the poet who must find the streets where the

shooting is going on. "One

imagines," he has said, "that it is

only those poets whose make-up somehow coincides with the vital

impulse of their times who are

able to come to real stature ?

when poets apparently more

naturally gifted simply wither away."

Ill* Poetry Must Seek Blood Roots

Poetry equipped for life means not moralizing poetry but rather

poetry equal by the breadth of its own special knowledge (call it

cunning) and integrity to what A. Alvarez has called the destructive realities we inhabit. It means a

poetry fully instructed in ex

perience from Olympic murders in Munich to Miss America TV

pageants. It is a poetry wary of snares, able to sniff despair, and

wise to the sell-out. Hughes describes the Yugoslav poet Vasko Popa's poetry as spare, stripped of false ideas and safe

JOHN

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Page 14 The American Poetry Review

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dispositions. "No poetry is more difficult to outflank, yet it is in no sense defensive. His poems are

trying to find out what does exist, and what the conditions really are. He never loses his deeply ingrained humour and irony: that is his way of hanging on to his human wholeness,"

Wholeness demands poetry alert to all the encounters beneath the shell of rational performance. "To live removed from this inner universe of experience," Hughes says in his poetry primer for young people, "is also to live removed from ourself, banished from ourself and real life. The

struggle truly to possess his own

experience, in other words to

regain his genuine self, has been man's principal occupation, wherever he could find leisure for it, since he first grew this enor

mous surplus of brain." If the

England ruled by sacrament and ceremony interested Eliot, it is

primordial England when

sturgeons cut the Thames and wolves crossed the moors that

Hughes summons. These are far starker realities than Wallace Stevens cast for when he said:

"Nothing illustrates the im

portance of poetry better than the

possibility that within it there may yet be found a reality adequate to the profound necessities of life today or for that matter any day."

Hughes would have poems send their words to feel the pressure that levels mountains and. to clutch the life that escapes out of dead pigs and skinned weasels and haunts the grey tones of photographs of soldiers long since buried.

What humbles these hills has raised The arrogance of blood and bone, And thrown ike hawk upon the wind, And lit the fox in the dripping ground.

(Lupercal, 14)

Whatever falsifies instinct, as does rhetoric, blocks visitations from the elemental world. The deepest loss is the loss of our

beginnings, Hughes's poems deploy words around those lost origins.

Now the mind's wandering elementals,

Ousted from the traveller-told

Unapproachable islands, From their heavens and their burning

underworld, Wait dully at the traffic crossing, Or lean over headlines, taking nothing

in.

(Lupercal, 20)

Reviewers, minds congealed by decorous banalities, react with cries of "paranoia!" to glimpses in his poems of that murderous churning world under us all. Yet

whole populations sit slumped in front of TV sets, feeding their hid den dreams of Gomorrah. In this rapt paralysis, Hughes says, "We are dreaming a perpetual

massacre. And when that leaks up into what ought to be morally responsible art ... then the critics pounce, and convert it to evidence in a sociological study." But the stink will not down. Though you skin the poet, his sucking truth will weasel up somewhere else:

They nailed to a door

The stoat with the sun in its belly, But its red unmanageable life Has licked the stylist out of their skulls, Has sucked that age like an egg and

gone off

Along ditches where flies and leaves

Overpower our tongues, got into some

grave ?

Not a dog to follow it down ?

Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in Brix ton.

fLupercal? 16)

The blood-roots of our lives where the myth-stoat makes his passage can sustain us in our state of civilized depletion, and no amount of civilized litter will choke out their vitality.

To Hughes's mind, Dylan Thomas had set out to reach that

deep realm of sustenance beneath the polite surfaces. "He made a half-conscious attempt to take on all the underground life that the upper-crustish, militant, colonial

suppressive cast of the English intelligence excludes.''

Hughes has sought to recover this lost life which death sub tracts. It is the vital force that haunts the photographs that turn up repeatedly in the poems. His poem of the dead pig stalks the absent life-force that had heaved beneath the factual hide:

Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes. Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk Set in death seemed not just dead. It was less than lifeless, further off. A remembrance of a greased

pig chase at a fair begins to restore to the carcass the lost fur nace of life:

Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.

Their bite is worse than a horse V? ?

They chop a half-moon clean out.

They eat cinders, dead cats.

fLupercal, 41)

The same gorge of life, what is now cleaned up, mentalized, ab stracted, and labeled "Diony sus," is what's missing behind the present English exterior, killed finally, Hughes believes, by the Puritan slaughter of the in stincts in the Seventeenth Cen tury.

THE NEW MOON A Magazine of Poetry

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Pfingston, Stap, others.

AUTUMN 1975 features Mark McCloskey, Robert Vander Molen, Albert Goldbarth; also Don Stap, M. R. Doty, Bond, Cooley, Novak, Le Mon, LeFabre, many others.

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He felt the restorative myths through his Yorkshire surroun

dings, particularly as the dialect transmitted energies of the primitive deities, as he calls them, out of "an instinct and ancestral memory/' Renewal of the language will come as it penetrates again to those origins. "One has only to look at our

vocabulary/' says Hughes, "to see where our real mental life has its roots, where the paths to and from our genuine imaginations run, clearly enough/' The Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Celtic gods are not obsolete: "they are the better part of our patrimony still locked up." Poetry alert to the old dialect root-sounds can open paths back and down to our

beginnings, to primal sources of brute being uncrippled by men

talizing.

The passage to that dark renewing realm must go in

directly and by imagination through the wilds of the mythic tales ? or through poetry. The

much acclaimed poem "Pike" is Hughes's quintessential enact ment of that adventure. After the coolly terrifying description of the pike's "submarine delicacy and horror," the poem concludes:

A pond I fished, fifty yards across, Whose lilies and muscular tench Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted, them ?

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense

and old

Thai past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished With the hair frozen on my head For what might move, for what eye

might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods Frail on my ear against the dream Darkness beneath night's darkness had

freed, Thai rose slowly towards me, watching,

^Lupercai, 57)

The poet in our day must, as here in Hughes's poem, call up the counterforce to civilized debilitation and savageness. His job takes a tough wiliness. The survivor poet, withstanding the

ordinary and inevitable destruc

tions and, like Crow, himself a kind of poet with a necessary courage and a crafty catechism, will also pass his test at the womb-door:

Who is stronger than hope? Death. Who is stronger than the will?

Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than death?

Me, evidently. Pass, Crow.

(Crow, 3)

IV. Poetry of Balance A deeply positioned balance is

the primary structure and source of integrity in Hughes's poetic consciousness. "Poetry is

nothing/' he says, "if not ... the record of just how the forces of the Universe try to redress some balance disturbed by human error.

"

Equilibrium is imaged forth in

cessantly in his poetry. The water

lily ? like a man's head, like a

poem ? holds its face upward to

light while the under part roots

deep in the bottom slime where: Prehistoric bedragonned times Crawl that darkness with Latin

names.

(Lupercal, 29}

The balance holds in dop pelganger themes in Hughes's tales, where protagonists are divided between human and bestial or mythological shape. The poems work less

schematically, seeking the vast

novelty of the dark world under the world, and taking momentary grips on its mystery, as the otter (to use an image of Hughes's) takes a stolen hold on the bitch otter in the field. The second book of poetry, Lupercal, like its name, is a summoning of the bestial for ces to vivify life, to make the women fertile, and to have the demons out of their holes again. Poems stalk that experience:

These feet, deprived,

Disdaining all that are caged, or

storied,or pictured,

Through and throughout the true

world search

For their vanished head, for the world

Vanished with the head, the

teeth, the quick eyes ?.

(Lupercal, 13}

Hughes's obsession with sheer force is inseparable from his courting of conditions of equipoise. "Repeatedly in the poems the imagination hauls up wards, following the hawk, to reach 44the master-fulcrum of violence" as Hughes calls the point of balance in 'The Hawk in the Rain." That is the in tersection of intense forces ?

whether in a life or in a poem ?

the point between what raises up and what destroys. Each poem is a position along the bar on that fulcrum, separate occasions

marking the force of intense op position. As in the hawk poem, that high risk leads to the laboriously, violently even, at tained place of equal coun terforces. At the point of that balance, in unfamiliar space, rests the life principle, "the diamond

September/October 1975 Page 15

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point of will."

Always, from that soaring feat, a fall is imagined or ex

perienced. For that is the failed

task, the fooFs overreach, or the error in the universal structure that must then again be redressed. The poise unbalances, the weather turns, the soaring hawk

suffers the air, hurled upside down,

Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,

The horizon trap him; the round

angelic eye

Smashed, mix the heart's blood

with the mire of the land.

/Hawk, 11)

The core figure of balance structures Hughes's ex

traordinary essay on the central fable in Shakespeare, whose

poetry he sees as a microcosm of the momentous counterforces

warring within Queen Elizabeth and in her times between satanic necessities and heavenly aspirations. The balance rests in sexual terms, and finally, as

Hughes reads Shakespeare, the central fable engages the mystery of integrating man's psychic wholeness. A similar balance bet ween the rational and dark sides constitutes Hughes's own central uroboric fable.

Vo Shamanism The primary analogue of

Hughes's enterprise is shamanism. It is a basic allegory, the dream of two worlds. "What am I?" Hughes begins the poem "Wodwo," its title an Old

English word he translates as "a sort of half-man half-animal

spirit," Defining a man's whole

nature, the enigma Hughes describes as the powerhouse at the center of Shakespeare's mind, is his also. It is the sphinx's rid

dle, and inspection of the vast lower realms is thus thrust upon the poet, as upon the shaman.

Hughes's selections from

Shakespeare, (1971), extracted from their contexts, reveal that central fable: the confrontation between Venus and Adonis, that

is, between the hidden and the rational. In that selection, Hughes says, "We see quite new

things a new teeming of

possibilities, as we look through them into our own darkness." The dark revelation re-enacts the shamanistic flight to the demon

world, the monomythic entry and return on the heroic quest. "You see very well," Hughes told an in

terviewer, "where Nietzsche got his Dionysus. It was a genuine vision of something on its way back to the surface. The rough beast in Yeats's poem." All that

energy and violence in Hughes's first book of poetry seem now in this light to have been an in stinctive ambush for the demons of life.

The shamanic experience lurks in all the images of the hunter, the

caged animals, and the other creature-confrontations. His animals locate our beginnings, the irreducible being, and the stubbornness of life. The hawk,

the fox, the otter, the pike, and the crow, are part of what we are when the hamburger bars, snowmobiles, plastic wrap, and

coming-out parties are sub tracted. It is anything but a fad dish primitivism on Hughes 's

part. Rather, shamanism

provides him with a model for the

original poetic act. It also ex

plains the kinship between his

poetry, folk-epic, plays and his children's verse and stories.

Hughes wrote in 1964: "The initiation dreams, the general schema of the shamanic flight, and the figures and adventures

they encounter, are not a shaman

monopoly: they are, in fact, the basic experience of the poetic temperament we call 'romantic'." In a shamanizing society, he con

tinued, "

'Venus and Adonis,' some of Keats's longer poems, 'The Wanderings of Oisin,' 'Ash

Wednesday,' would all qualify their authors for the magic drum (of the shaman); while the actual

flight lies perceptibly behind many of the best fairy tales, and behind myths such as those of Or

pheus and Herakles, and behind the epics of Gilgamesh and

Odysseus. It is the outline, in

fact, of the Heroic Quest. The shamans seem to undergo, at will and at phenomenal intensity, and with practical results, one of the main regenerating dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental

poetic event." We note particularly the idea

of practicality. For Hughes is not a mystic, but rather a man

making the most practical sort of claims for poetry. "Shamanism," he said, "is not a religion, but a

technique for moving in a state of

ecstasy among the various

spiritual realms, and for generally dealing with souls and spirits, in a

practical way, in some practical crisis." This is a shamanism of useful transport, treating real delusions.

Hughes had his own practical crisis early, according to W. S.

Merwin, whose account of it puts flesh on this mystical passage.

Merwin, in 1959 or 1960, had sent his poem "Lemuel's Blessing" to

Hughes to read. Eight years later, Merwin wrote: When I'd finished the poem ... I

showed it to Ted Hughes. It was the

last winter that he and Sylvia were

living around the corner from us in

London. He told me a story. At Cam

bridge he set out to study English literature. Hated it. Groaned having to

write those essays. Felt he was dying of it in some essential place. Sweated

late at night over the paper on Dr.

Johnson et al ? things he didn't want

to read. One night, very late, very

tired, he went to sleep. Saw the door

open and someone like himself come in

with a fox's head. The visitor went over

to his desk, where an unfinished essay was lying, and put his paw on the

papers, leaving a bloody mark; then he

came over to the bed, looked down at

Ted and said, "You're killing us," and

went out the door.

Hughes switched to an

thropology at Cambridge! The ac count records an early working out of Hughes's compulsion, no doubt with suggestive con nections to Jung's experience.

Hughes has written on

Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Keith Douglas, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath, locating in each the deep-diving, conjuring, soul-restoring shamanic power. He finds them all gropers in the pit. He sees

parallels between the psychotic state and the shaman's plunge, both being breaches in the hum drum which lead to openings of

terrifying disclosure. The poet's craft is to make words enact those disclosures. Of Sylvia Plath, he has said, she "had free and con trolled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic

priests, shamans and Holy men, and more recently flung open to tourists with the passport of such

hallucinogens as LSD." Dylan Thomas's death of alcohol

poisoning in New York, Hughes interprets as a final shamanist

summoning by Thomas of the central life out of his own brain stem. "What he was really waiting for, and coaxing with

alcohol," wrote Hughes, "was the delicate cerebral disaster that demolishes the old self for good, with all its crushing for tifications, and leaves the atman a clear field."

Shakespeare stands in

Hughes's mind pre-eminently as the poet enacting the shamanic excursion. Of Shakespeare's cen tral obsession with the body-mind antagonism in "Venus and Adonis," Hughes says, "it is a

perfect example of the ancient shamanisic dream of the call to the poetic or holy life ... It em bodies the biological polarity of the life of the body and archaic nervous system and the life of the reflexive cortex. In more concrete

form, the fable contains hints of atavistic memories from earlier times, resurfaeings of rituals and

symbols of which Shakespeare cannot have heard or read.''

VI. The Poet-Shaman The procedures of that

discovery in poetry today demand a broad-sensing creature-poet, able to traverse what Hughes has called the realm between our or

dinary minds and our deepest life. The data field, consisting of the

signal-laden air and the image cluttered landscape of experience, surrounds the poet. Reality everywhere gives its lessons:

Its mishmash of scripture and

physics, With here, brains in hands, for exam

ple, And there, legs in a tree top.

(Crow, 14)

The field of data includes Belfast and King Kong and John Milton. Everywhere the collec tion is purposeful; no experience is outside the poet's territory. In

deed, Hughes conceives himself as a sort of cosmic signalman taking up his post in the beach bunker after the armistice papers have been signed. He said of

World War II soldiers: "All they wanted was to get back into civ vies and get home to the wife and kids for the rest of their lives ...

They'd had enough sleeping out.

Now I came a bit later. I hadn't had enough. I was all for opening negotiations with whatever hap pened to be out there." Thus

Hughes's encounters are with creatures quite unlike London clerks:

At nightfall as the sea darkens, A depth darkness thickens, mustering

from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,

To the sea's edge. To begin with

It looks like rocks uncovering,

mangling their pallor.

Gradually the laboring of the tide Falls back from its productions, Its power slips back from glistening

nacelles, and

they are crabs. Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring

inland

Like a packed trench of helmets.

(Wodwo,21)

Creature and human merge in

Hughes's vision, as do creature and poem. The obsession attends his remarks on Popa, whose words, he writes, "test their way forward, sensitive to their own

errors, dramatically and in

timately alive, like the antennae of some rock-shore creatures

feeling out the presence of the sea and the huge powers in it... There is a primitive pre~creation at

mosphere about his work, as if he were present where all

dynamisms and formulae were

ready and charged, but nothing created ? or only a few frag

ments/'

Probes to the underworld must, in our post-literate culture, be fashioned from a vast field of cluttered and vernacular ex

perience. To Hughes the con

temporary poet is thus a serious

scavenger. The litter of his world includes surreal experience: dreams, nightmares, madness, terror, bestiality, automatism.

We come upon Hughes himself

ransacking the movies, animated

cartoons, birthday card greet ings, folk songs, montage overloading, children's fables, whatever comes to the hand in a

wasting culture where ad

vertising has replaced literature as the imagination's image-pool and TV talk show-hosts are the models of intellect. Hughes's scavenging of the languages of all these media produces a boggling

mixture of tangent literary for ms: heroic epics, folk epic, myth, cycles. lyrics, chants, in cantations.

In this way, Hughes leaves the radio receiver turned on and

dutifully makes all the visits, standing "respectfully, hat in

hand, before this creation, ex

ceedingly alert for a new word.'5 We see this new type picking over the debris, turning up the dismembered corpse in the gar bage can. We see him crouched for cover in the doorway. Or we see him verging on the ridiculous in that extraordinary fable of the

poet Crow. The figure is hardly decorous. Crow, a survivor, seated we may believe in some cartoon pub, launches his pop Homeric epic: "There was this terrific battle ..." and so on.

But the portrait of Hughes's new poet also takes form in those

Page 16 The American Poetry Review

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magnificent lines of Jocasta

(from his translation of Seneca's

Oedipus), as the bloody knot in the bessemer furnace of the world's body:

blood from my toes my finger ends

blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids

blood from the roots of my hair

blood from before

any time began it flowed into the knot of his bowels,

into the knot

of his muscles

the knot of his brain

my womb tied everything together every comer of the

earth and the heavens and every trickle of the dead past twisted it all into shape beside me

what was he what wasn Y he

the question was unasked

fOedipus, 23-25)

VII. A New Language The writer does not wrest

speech from silence as we are told in pious literary hagiographics, says Roland Barthes, but "in

versely, and how much more ar

duously, more cruelly and less

gloriously, he detaches a secon

dary language from the slime of

primary languages afforded him

by the world, history, his exist ence." Hughes has been intent on

extracting just such an exact

speech congruous to the con sciousness of the late twentieth

century. He calls this extraction

"utility" speech; that is, a

language ready for whatever ex

perience comes up, agile enough

to take whatever position it must, in all ways alert.

The animal figure together with Hughes's idea of the reach of dialect merge in his description of the style of Keith Douglas (1920 1944). It could deal, he said in an early essay, "with whatever it came up against, a versatile, ruthless, direct style not limited to certain subjects in certain

moods. It is a utility general purpose style, as for instance

Shakespeare's was; a style that combines a colloquial readiness and variety with a poetic breadth; a ritual intensity and music of an exceedingly high or der with a clear wholehearted passion."

Hughes's regard for directness and versatility is rooted in his ap preciation of Shakespeare's language. Unlike the atrophied system of bleats Hughes hears in

contemporary England, Shakespeare's language, he says, "has the air of being invented in a state of crisis, for a terribly urgent job, a homely spur-of-the moment improvisation out of whatever verbal scrap happens to be lying around, and this is exac

tly what real speech is." He finds a similar colloquial scavenging in

Emily Dickinson's language, a

"Shakespearean texture ... solid with metaphor, saturated with the homeliest imagery and ex

perience." What Hughes develops in Crow is this same

language "super-crude": "the

whole crush and cramming throw away expressiveness of it was

right at the heart of its dialect/' Hughes has reconnoitered the

arcadias and alleys of our available language. For Crow to articulate the ache of love, the Crow-Bard has available the lexicons of detergent ads, the

military, government releases, King Kong movies, industry board rooms, and urban politics. Hughes scoured his language of the early accretions: Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas ("we ran out, mice in our

pockets and straw in our hair,/In to the darkness that was avalan ching to horses/And a quake of hooves" (Lupercal 21). The Crow poems chronicle Crow's survival and give us the stripped language of that survival, rough and ready, equal to life, knowing all the angles, leering, a con-man's way, yet singing, library to street, in the contemporary rhythms we

recognize as our lives. There are in Crow, too, mo

ments of the ritual conjuring language we associate with the shaman's preparation. Some of it

begins the book: Black was the without eye Black the within tongue Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs Unable to suck in light.

(Crow, 1)

In his adaptation of Oedipus from Seneca, Hughes had already raised this incantatory language

(part of the utility) to its fullest power. There are in that play passages simultaneously or

dinary and ruthless, sounding (to use Hughes's terms) a ritual in

tensity and a full passion. Jocasta's lines reach with simple directness to the dark mysteries:

when I carried my sons

I carried them for death I car

ried them for the throne

I carried them for the final disaster when I carried

my first son

did I know what was coming did

I know

what ropes of blood were twisting

together what bloody footprints were hurrying together in my body

(Oedipus, 22)

Perhaps nowhere else in con

temporary poetry is there

language to surpass the brute

strength of some of the recitations in Hughes's Oedipus, Creon describes how the priest called up the creatures of the un derworld ?- death and hellish

dogs, Tiresias ? until King Laius rises to the surface, a specter summoned up from the world un der the world (the passage has direct ties to the poem "Pike," more than a decade earlier):

it lifted its face and I

recognized Laius

Our King Laius he pulled himself up it was

him his whole body was plastered with blood his

hair beard face all one terrible wound a mash of

In o series of worm,

personal recollections, novelist ond publisher D.M. Davin has drown

tellingly human portraits of seven of the great fellow

writers who were among his friends: Julian Maclaren

Ross, W. R. Rodgers, Louis

MacNeice, Enid Starkie, Joyce Gary, Dylan Thomas,

and Ifzik Manger.

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Donald Davie, one of

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?

as "mostly amiable and

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THE SHIRES Donald Davie

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One acclaimed young poet explores another

poet's life. This provocative work "evokes the period,

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thing like the fullness and the deliberation with which Lawrence and Joyce wrote

up their own early years.'' ?Times Literary

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WILFRED OWEN Jon Stallworthy

With 80 illustrations. $ 17.50

Page 17

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mud brains blood

(Oedipus, 52) This is utility language doing a

rough job; it also has starkly delicate moods. Jocasta, mad dened by her look into truth's socket, steps to Oedipus after he has gouged out his eyes:

what can I call you now what

shall I call you you 're my son shall I call you

my son

are you ashamed

you are my son I lost you

you 're alive I've found you

speak to me

show me your face turn your head toward me show

me your face

(Oedipus, 87-88)

Given the rudimentary in

tensity of language that Hughes can achieve, measuring the power he means to make it discharge, and sighting the other world he intends to exhume along its path, it is little wonder that he has

sought to close completely the cir cuit between language and the world under the world. His recent aim is a language absolutely of surface accretions. This is

possible only by distilling a previously unavailable purity of

expression. Hughes attempts this in Orghast, a play written in a

made-up language of the primary man. The premise, according to Tom Stoppard in an interview with Hughes, is that "the sound of the human voice, as opposed to

language, is capable of projecting very complicated mental states."

What we have in Orghast is the shamanic hope of raising the un derworld up through the surface Babel by a conjuring language devised as a game of sounds. In other words, Orghast (play and

language) is the product of the

merging of the shaman and the

gamesman, the one attempting to raise the raw dream of the un derlife and the other to give it voice. Stoppard quoted Peter

Brook, the director: "Orghast aims to be a leveller of audiences

by appealing not to semantic athleticism but to the instinctive

recognition of a 1 mental state'

within a sound. One can hardly imagine a bolder challenge to the limits of narrative." What does the word Orghast

mean? It is the product of two

roots, "or^g" and "ghast," which, according to Stoppard, Hughes has "pulled to the top of his con sciousness to provide sounds for 'life' and 'spirit, flame,' respec tively. 'Thus orghast,' Hughes explained, 'is the name for "the fire of being" ... and so,

metaphorically,"sun." '

Some

where between sun and life and spirit the Middle English word aghast floats up, too, ac

tivating another layer just below our consciousness. What's the

point? Hughes's remarkable ex

periment demonstrates the im

possibility of escaping totally from semantic habits without

simply writing noise-music; in other words, he has set a marker at the outermost boundary of

poetry that is made of words. Like Orghast, Crow is an

inevitable stage in Hughes's

drive for the instinctual center. The aim is a serious gaming with life, a folk-loring of it, a Popa izing of it. The trick is to hold contemporary experience in the terms that can contain it, without

losing the evidence of its density and its contradictions. Crow stands as a present culmination of

Hughes' s shamanic deep-diving for totemic powers to balance life's horrors and im

poverishments. The poet is no longer simply

watching, but has identified him self as man and poet with this black scavenger bird. As he said of Popa's survival method, games can grasp by their simple terms a

deeper than ordinary reality, "as

puppets are deeper than our human reality: the more human

they look and act the more elemental they seem."

VIII. New Folk Forms Fabling, like mathematics and

mythologies, supplies the terms and the strategies for managing that realm between our ordinary

minds and our deepest life. Crow, for all his simplicity as a fable

figure, initiates profound associations. He is, by a fresh

ingenuity, related in Hughes's mind to that chap Hamlet who also found himself directly in the

practical business of surviving. Hamlet, says Hughes, was in serted into the mythic conflict in

Shakespeare's mind represented by the deposed Goddess-figure Elizabeth and the "new Jehovah" James I. Hughes describes Hamlet: ''Mother-wet, weak

legged, horrified at the task, boggling." Crow's cathechism at the womb-door is Hamlet's

soliloquy for our own age, in con

temporary utility language: Who owns these questionable

brains? Death.

All this messy blood? Death.

These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.

This wicked little tongue? Death.

This occasional wake fulness? Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?

Held.

Crow is also more than Hamlet because he is less. He is not an idealist come to adjust a time out of joint, but a creature intent on

surviving whatever the times

(Crow, 3)

raise against him. He embodies the instinct in all of us. God is some executive, a kind of fum

bling division sales manager or chairman of the board. Crow is

stark, sinewy, undistracted by thoughts of a purpose. He is the

primary engine. He is the poet and the poet's poem. Against the

mystery of his existence, momen

tarily he defines (in one of the few

passages where he speaks) the

prophecy that grimaces inside him. It is to be inside the

mystery, to be inside his exist ence ((AS INSIDE MY OWN LAUGHTER/AND NOT STARING OUT AT IT THROUGH WALLS/OF MY EYE'S COLD QUARANTINE" {Crow, p. 11).

The terms of Hughes's un

dertaking in Crow are derivable from the terms by which he in

terprets Vasko Popa's later work. Crow entertains us even as it hauls us along the way stations of man's suffering, stupidity, and

longing. Hughes says of one of

Popa's grimly-playful poems: "It is all there, the surprising fusion of unlikely elements. The

sophisticated philosopher is also a primitive, gnomic spell-maker. The desolate view of the Universe

opens through eyes of childlike simplicity and moody oddness. The wide perspective of general elemental and biological law is

spelled out with folklore hieroglyphs and magical mon sters. The whole style is mar

vellously effective artistic in vention. It enables Popa to be as abstract as man can be, yet remain as intelligible and en

tertaining and as fully human as if he were telling a comic story.''

He calls Popa's mode the surrealism of folklore, and the discriminations he makes help us to grasp the radical character of this new poetic consciousness in

Hughes himself. The little fables or visionary anecdotes of Popa's, he says, show us "most clearly his shift from literary surrealism to the far older and deeper thing, the surrealism of folklore. The distinction between the two seems to lie in the fact that

literary surrealism is always con nected with an extreme remove from the business of living under

practical difficulties and suc

cessfully managing them. The

mind, having abandoned the

struggle with circumstances and

consequently lost the unifying focus that comes of that, has lost

morale and surrendered to the ar

bitrary imagery of the dream flow. Folktale surrealism, on the other hand, is always urgently connected with the business of

trying to manage practical dif ficulties so great that they have forced the sufferer temporarily out of the dimension of coherent

reality into the depth of imagination where understanding has its roots and stores its X

rays." The linkage of frames that

comprise the cyclic form of Crow communicates its own meaning, too. Hughes's remarks on Popa clarify his own procedures, and

we see another angle of the utility language. "The air of trial and error exploration, of an im

provised language, the attempt to

get near something for which he is almost having to invent the

words in a total disregard for

poetry or the normal conventions of discourse, goes with his habit of working in cycles of poems. He will trust no phrase with his

meaning for more than six or seven words at a time before he corrects his tack with another

phrase from a different direction. In the same way, he will trust no

poem with his meaning for more than fifteen or so lines, before he tries again from a totally dif ferent direction with another

poem. Each cycle creates the terms of a Universe, which he then explores, more or less

methodically, with the terms."

IX. To Conclude The common element in these

techniques is the need of men to face practical crises, to make life

manageable by clinging to the simple structures of it. The shaman's aesthetic penetrates to those brute simplicities and hauls them back to the surface. The

poet tries to reach beginnings also, seeking the raw dream in

simple fables, summoning shaman-like the dogs of energy up through the interstices in the civilized pavements.

The language of radical sub traction is the real cut of

Hughes's undertaking. Sometimes super-crude, it is a

language ready to undertake

anything human or creaturely. This is Hughes's great triumph, reducing language to its stark in

strumentality. The result is a

poetry of practical activity, the

fitting out of the tribe against the elaborate hostility of existence.

Like his Tomcat made of wor

ds, his poems prowl the slick car

pets of our above-ground lives and make our ignorance edgy. They are about their business of

trying to manage our practical difficulties.

The second collection of poems by the author

of Coming Close

CASTING STONES POEMS BY HELEN CHASIN

Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series

$6.95 clothbound, $3.50 paperbound LITTLE, BROWN

Page 18 The American Poetry Review

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