Beyond the Gentility Principle :
Ted Hughes
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The Gentility Principle
• Robert Conquest in New Lines (1956) presented a set of
principles in the work of the Movement poets:
– rejection of tradition: ‘I have no belief in “Tradition” or a common
myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets’
(Philip Larkin, in D.J. Enright’s Poets of the 1950s, 1955)
– empiricism: ‘It is empirical in attitude’ (Conquest)
– rejection of second-hand experience: ‘Nobody wants any more
poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art
galleries or mythologies or foreign cities or other poems.’
(Kingsley Amis, ibid.)
– the writer‘s duty is to be ‘original’ (Larkin, London Magazine,
1964)
– purity of diction, comprehensible language
– no interest in foreign influences
– admiration of common sense
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Beyond the Gentility Principle I
• A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962)
• The ‘gentility’ of the Movement: ‘Life is always
more or less orderly, people always more or less
polite, their emotions and habits more or less
decent and more or less controllable, that God,
in short, is more or less good’.
• Proposition: ‘poetry needs a new seriousness’,
i.e.: ‘the poet’s ability and willingness to face the
full range of his experience with his full
intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either
conventional response or choking incoherence’.
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Beyond the Gentility Principle II
• Alvarez compares –
• Larkin’s ‘At Grass’: common sense,
understatement, gentle, unpretentious, nostalgic
recreation of English countryside, social
creatures of race horses
• Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’: less controlled, it
is ‘about something’, recreates a ‘powerful
complex of emotions and sensations’, the horses
have a violent, threatening presence, partly
physical and partly a state of mind.
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Ted Hughes
(1930-1998)
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I imagine this
midnight moment’s
forest:
Something else is
alive
Beside the clock’s
loneliness
And this blank
page where my
fingers move.
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Ted Hughes
and Syliva Plath
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Ted Hughes
with
Frieda
and
Nicholas
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Kensington, May 1960: Spender, Auden,
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Hughes, Eliot and MacNiece
Ted Hughes’s Memorial Stone, Mytholmroyd
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‘The Thought-Fox’
•
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
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From 'The Burnt Fox'
[…]I began to dream. I dreamed I had never left my table and was still sitting
there, bent over the lamp-lit piece of foolscap, staring at the same few lines across
the top. Suddenly my attention was drawn to the door. I thought I had heard
something there. As I waited, listening, I saw the door was opening slowly. Then a
head came round the edge of the door. It was about the height of a man's head but
clearly the head of a fox - though the light over there was dim. The door opened wide
and down the short stair and across the room towards me came a figure that was at
the same time a skinny man and a fox walking erect on its hind legs. It was a fox, but
the size of a wolf. As it approached and came into the light I saw that its body and
limbs had just now stepped out of a furnace. Every inch was roasted, smouldering,
black-charred, split and bleeding. Its eyes, which were level with mine where I sat,
dazzled with the intensity of the pain. It came up until it stood beside me. Then it
spread its hand - a human hand as I now saw, but burned and bleeding like the rest
of him - flat palm down on the blank space of my page. At the same time it said: 'Stop
this - you are destroying us.' Then as it lifted its hand away I saw the blood-print, like
a palmist's specimen, with all the lines and creases, in wet, glistening blood on the
page.
I immediately woke up. The impression of reality was so total, I got out of bed
to look at the papers on my table, quite certain that I would see the blood-print there
on the page.
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‘Poetry and Violence’ I
In relation to my verse the word 'violence' was
originally used by Edwin Muir, in his review of my first
collection, where he qualified it as 'admirable violence'
- speaking about the poem titled 'Jaguar'. What is
'admirable violence'? [...]
When Saul fell on the road, as he is said to have
done, and ceased to exist, while Paul the Father of the
Church rose up in his place and in his skin, Saul could
justifiably have called it 'homicidal violence' (since he
was not merely displaced but annihilated), but Paul could
properly have called it 'admirable violence', since it
united him with Christ and his highest spiritual being.
How do those kinds of 'violence' relate to 'our customary
social and humanitarian values'?
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‘Poetry and Violence’ II
When you arrange the common uses of the word in a pattern you can
see just how the confusions about its meaning arise. First of all, the word
obviously covers a great range of different degrees of seriousness. By
seriousness I mean serious in the way of moral and spiritual consequences.
The general image behind the word is always a vehement action that
breaks through something, but the moral and spiritual consequences can be
all-important and immense or they can be nil. One imagines the line of a
graph of increasing seriousness, with the word recurring all the way along it,
from weak, loose meaning with nil or trivial consequences at one end to
strong, specific meaning with enormous consequences at the other. Yet at
any point on the graph it is the same little bald word 'violence'.
Simultaneously, wherever it sits on the graph, the word can have either
positive implications or negative. Isolated on a page, the word can give
no idea of how serious it is meant to be, or whether its implications are
positive or negative. These crucial extras depend wholly on context. And
when the word is used virtually without context, as in that phrase 'poetry of
violence', it is not actually meaningless but it is a word still waiting to be
defined. It still contains all the different degrees of seriousness, and every
positive or negative implication: they are all writhing around inside it, waiting
to be selected. [...]
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‘Poetry and Violence’ III
At the weak, loose extreme, though the ethical implications
are trivial or nil, the meaning can still be negative or positive. One
can use the word 'violence' to describe a passion, a cavorting horse,
or a dancer, and be perfectly well understood to mean something
positive and exciting admiration. More usually, even at this weak,
loose extreme, the word carries negative implications - as in the
media phrase 'sex and violence'. Generally, in this case, it signifies
forceful physical damage inflicted on the person or the property of
another, but here too, when the 'violence' is contained within a tight,
exemplary system of just retribution, the moral and spiritual
consequences are considered to be slight and under control. If the
physical damage begins to escape the system of controls, and
larger negative moral, spiritual consequences begin to be felt - as
can sometimes happen in the media - then the violence shifts along
the graph. It begins to move towards a stronger, more specific
degree of seriousness.
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‘Poetry and Violence’ IV
At the other end of the graph, at the strong, specific extreme,
'violence' is in another world. The real negative vigour of the word
now comes to the fore in the idea of violation. The core of its
meaning opens up, to reveal a rape of some kind, the destruction of
a sacred trust, the breaking of a sacred law. Central to the general
idea of the criminally lawless and the physically vehement is that
particular horror of sacrilege. Meanwhile, the moral and the spiritual
consequences have become all-important - contagious and farreaching in their evil effects. This radical, negative, strong sense of
the word 'violence' seems to be its primary one. That's the meaning
we use when we call Hitler's gang 'men of violence'. All our vigilant
apprehension is fixed on it with good reason. Behind that sense of
the word lies everything we have learned about the explosive evil in
human nature.
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‘Poetry and Violence’ V
Nevertheless, at this extreme, too, the word can
have positive implications. The meanings of the action
are now inverted. We no longer have a murderous force
which violates a sacred law. Instead we have a lifebringing assertion of sacred law which demolishes, in
some abrupt way, a force that oppressed and violated it.
The image I suggested for this strong, positive violence
('admirable violence') was the sudden spontaneous
conversion of Saul to Paul. The moral and spiritual
consequences are again all-important, contagious and
far-reaching, but now considered entirely good.
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‘Violence’
Dancer
Media: sex&
violence
conversion of Saul
to Paul
Violation/sacrilege
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From ‘Thrushes’
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living - a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce,
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.
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From 'Poetry and Violence'
Considering the three images - Thrush, Mozart's brain and Shark - as
hieroglyphs, only one has a clear self-evident meaning. So that one is the key to the
others. Mozart's composing brain - the lump of animal brain tissue producing Mozart's
music - has a single plain meaning: divine activity in something fleshly. However
else we interpret the image, our ideas revolve around this fixed, central axis of
meaning. [...]
Neither Thrush nor Shark can properly be defined by the weak, loose negative
meaning of 'violent'. There are several factors in each situation contradicting that
sense. The Thrush is doing what it has evolved to do, and is feeding its young as
well. The Shark is doing what it has evolved to do and what uniquely determines
everything about it, but has been tricked, in innocence, to turn the activity against
itself, unknowing. So other meanings open up in both mages. [...]
It is not unorthodox to see that there is a clear and strong sense in which both
Thrush and Shark are obeying - in selfless, inspired (i.e. lucid) obedience, like
Mozart's brain - the creator's law which shaped their being and their inborn activity.
And they are obeying it with that effortless instantaneity which is a 'divine'
characteristic, also, of Mozart's composition.
This is where what the critics called 'poetry of [negative] violence' begins to
assert its credentials as poetry of positive violence, poetry about the working of
divine law in created things. [...]
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