Ted Hughes Flashcards
Sagar (post Plath)
In Hughes world post Plath’s death his vision = a world of blood and of nature as monstrous.
Poems become emotional, direct and regretful
Sagar (general)
Hughes words burn our heart with love of creation but also purifying guilt at what we’ve done to it and ourselves
Webb
Hughes interested with the survivalist qualities evidenced in WW1 (maybe link this to way he describes animals)!
Robert Graves
Poetry is rooted in magic… poets are in touch with a mysterious magical potency
Shirley
He was part of the landscape, elemental and unchangeable
Romantics
Red believed British Poetry needed to return to a sense of wholeness not explored since romantics et Blake
Wanted to use clear, simplistic language
Create poems for the working class
Spectator
Natural things in these poems have become spokesmen for the hidden and violent beings obeying law of nature.
Ted Hughes about hawk roosting
Don’t look for too many symbols or you might kill the poem
New York Times
His work comes alive because it’s rooted in the fundamental truth of a need for identity
Review he wrote in spectator
Called “the environmental revolution”
He believed Christianity’s rejection of nature due to the belief god gave earth to man for them to exercise has resulted in mans exile from nature internally and externally
What does Hughes say hawk represents
The natural world that’s unaware of death. Man knows of death before death. Heightens hawks transcendent tone doesn’t fear death as doesn’t know it will one day capture it
Poetry =
Psychological component of the auto-immune system
Romantics link
Emotion over reason, senses over intellect
Deepened appreciation of beauties of nature
Heighten examination of human personality
Emphasis on imagination as a gateway to spiritual truth
Alice Oswald
He finds a way of stripping away the protective layers
Imaginative grasp of the present
Hughes and imagination
What alter the imagination alters everything
