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
After war Hughes feeling
Living among the survivors in the remains
He Warns us about …
Natural creativity. Henry Williams ugly politics based on fascism derived from love of natural energies. Believed natural hierarchy = desirable
Simon Armitage
He allowed the surrounding world to be translated, experienced and understood.
Catalytic material
Authony Easthope
Not really a poem about horses… attempts to catch their relation to something beyond them
Walder
His poems are designed to alter us to another dimension
Sense of what lurks beneath the cosily domestic surface of everyday life
Thought fox what did ted believe
Following ones nose and gathering electric wisdom is better.
He had a lust for free range intellectual energy
Came to this conclusion after dreamt about fox.
“Stop this - you are destroying us”
Thought fox - what did ted believe this poem showed?
His richest revelation of the evolution of his poetic self.
Horses - what do they represent?
Strength of will and a natural grace we should emulate.
Hughes often felt imprisoned by human attachments eg kids. Restricted his poetry and time to be alone thinking.
The jaguar
Humans highlighted as dangerously powerful due to explicit description of our ability to demonise and destroy wild beauty within nature.
Illustrated by animals sedentary limitations of existence.
Simon Armitage - full moon and little Frieda
He captures a single tender moment of a child’s giving voice to the universe
He sees his daughter discovering nature. In that exact moment time magically slows down
