Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid)

[selenak]

As promised here in my report of the Frankfurt Book Fair, I've now collected the passages of Letters of Ted Hughes which for one reason or another struck me most.

Comments

[kalypso_v]

You've reminded me that Richard Armitage was reading from the letters on Radio Four last Monday, and I need to listen to it via Listen Again tonight as it will disappear tomorrow.

[selenak]

Wow, thank you for the tip!

*must edit post to include same*

[ponygirl2000]

These are great! Thanks for posting.

[aervir]

Here via friendsfriends.

As someone who's only got a rather superficial knowledge of Hughes and Plath (i.e. the obligatory poems every EngLit student will be exposed to, sooner or later), I found these extracts very interesting, particularly with regard to the bad reputation Hughes seems to have acquired among some feminist enthusiasts of Plath's works. I found these letters very honest and very moving in these personal matters. And his comments on the mythologization of WWI were also quite intriguing.

Thanks for taking the time to post this!

(OT: I have been lurking in your journal for quite some time, without ever commenting, mainly for your entries on the Buffyverse, Doctor Who, Life on Mars and some movie reviews. I hope you don't mind if I finally friend you.)

[selenak]

Not at all, you're welcome!

Re:Hughes' reputation, the Spike Wars have nothing on the Sylvia and Ted debates raging through the decades. Personally, I wouldn't have wanted to be married to either of them, but I love their poetry, I think they brought out both the best and the worst in each other as people, and that neither party was blameless when it came to their breakup. But TH didn't have a backstory of suicide attempts and of course he didn't kill himself. Was his desertion one of the reasons why SP got to a state where she did? Well, yes. Was it the only reason? No. Was he therefore to blame for her death? IMO no, not from a rational pov, but suicides are about emotions. And he, not the readers, was the one who had to live with this death of a woman he had undoubtedly loved, in the knowledge that it might not have happened if he had acted differently in 1962. And the one who raised their children, and seems to have managed to do that without the kids repeating the psychodrama of the previous generation.

WWI mythologization: yes,

[aervir]

Re:Hughes' reputation, the Spike Wars have nothing on the Sylvia and Ted debates raging through the decades.

Literary history in fandom analogies -- heh.

And I completely agree with you on the assessment of Ted Hughes's responsibility (or lack thereof) for his wife's suicide and the shadow this must have cast over his life, too. That his second wife killed her self as well is, well, I'm reluctant to call it one of life's ironies because that's far too flippant -- I can only imagine it as unbearable.

I didn't know this poem from his last collection, but I find it fascinating because its use of Strange Meeting not that straightforward at all. I've just reread it, and it seems strangely unclear which metaphor refers to what, and who has got which role here. Is Sylvia the warzone, and her husband and her father the enemies that keep killing each other, that are destroyed, and simultaneously reconciled? That are victims of the battlefield but have also destroyed it (by implication)? Or is she "in the catacomb" with them as well? Or

I

[selenak]

Oh, most of the Birthday Letters poems are fantastic to read. I'll give you some more quotes in a second. Re: the use of "Strange Meeting" - it should be added that this is one of the last poems of the collection, and in the previous ones, which are addressed to Sylvia, her father (at least the father imago she has on her mind) is definitely the enemy, whereas here you end on a note of reconciliation. The different interpretations you suggest are all intriguingly possible

[diotimah]

Thanks for the link to TH's fascinating letter. I agree with his analysis of the reasons why that the "Great War" (it's still called that for a reason, after all) had a much deeper impact on the British (and especially the English) "psyche"/ mentality than WW II. "It was something much more inclusive - the shock suffered by a species that had thought the world was quite different, and that war was quite different" - indeed. Do you know Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV(http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4789)? I've always found the last stanza particularly poignant

[selenak]

No, I didn't know the Larkin poem. That's a hell of a final stanza.

The officer factor reminded me of another consequence of WWI, though - Owen, Graves, Sassoon, they all were upper class. In the pre-WWI England, someone like Ted Hughes might never have gotten published the way he did, let alone had the impact he did or made it to poet laureate. In a way, Hughes’ attitude is the flipside of the Evelyn Waugh type nostalgia (though Waugh’s is tied to pre-WWII rather than pre-WWI) - he can’t forget those poets would have had people like his father as servants and subordinates, instead of seeing that as a lost idyll (idyll for whom?).

[diotimah]

"No, I didn't know the Larkin poem. That's a hell of a final stanza