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

[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:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

By the way, it's also interesting to read about TH's ambivalent feelings about Wilfred Owen (whom I know he admired as a poet), due to his status as an officer.

Oh, and all the letters are interesting. A first-rate American poetess, indeed ...*g*

[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."

Indeed. Larkin was a great poet, with an extremely sharp, disillusioned perception of human relationships, although (or because of) he lived quite a reclusive life himself.

I've also found this one really sad and impressive:

Talking In Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.

"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?)."

Yes, indeed. As it happens, I can sympathise with this kind of ambivalence, as my maternal granny, who is from Pomerania, worked as a maid in aristocratic households in the late 1930s and the early war years, and her stories about her experiences certainly had a part in shaping my fascination for history, as well as my own ambivalent feelings about the lost world of the German "East".

In the case of Great Britain, of course, the nostalgia for the pre-WW1-era is also the nostalgia for the last time when the country could genuinely consider itself a "world power". There must have been few epochs in which the (male) elite could be as certain about its "superiority" and place in the order of things.