Ted Hughes (1930-98)
The Gentility Principle Robert Conquest ed., New Lines (1956). Presented a set of principles in the work of
the Movement poets: rejection of tradition; empiricism; rejection of second-hand experience; originality;
comprehensible language; conservatism; common sense; etc.
A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962). Reaction against the Movement: against insular, provincial, intelligent and
unemotional poetry. 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’. Compares Larkin’s ‘At Grass’: common sense, understatement, gentle,
unpretentious, nostalgic recreation of English countryside, social creatures of race horses; and 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.
1)
Read the poem ‘The Thought-Fox’ and the essay ‘The Burnt Fox’, and compare the main themes and issues in the two texts.
‘The Thought-Fox’
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
From 'The Burnt Fox'
And this blank page where my fingers move.
[…]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,
Through the window I see no star:
staring at the same few lines across the top. Suddenly my
Something more near
attention was drawn to the door. I thought I had heard something
Though deeper within darkness
there. As I waited, listening, I saw the door was opening slowly.
Is entering the loneliness:
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
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
light over there was dim. The door opened wide and down the
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
short stair and across the room towards me came a figure that
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
was at the same time a skinny man and a fox walking erect on its
And again now, and now, and now
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
Sets neat prints into the snow
stepped out of a furnace. Every inch was roasted, smouldering,
Between trees, and warily a lame
black-charred, split and bleeding. Its eyes, which were level with
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
mine where I sat, dazzled with the intensity of the pain. It came
Of a body that is bold to come
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 Across clearings, an eye,
flat palm down on the blank space of my page. At the same time
A widening deepening greenness,
it said: 'Stop this - you are destroying us.' Then as it lifted its
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
hand away I saw the blood-print, like a palmist's specimen, with
Coming about its own business
all the lines and creases, in wet, glistening blood on the page.
I immediately woke up. The impression of reality was
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
so total, I got out of bed to look at the papers on my table, quite
It enters the dark hole of the head.
certain that I would see the blood-print there on the page.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
2) How does Hughes define ‘violence’ in his essay ‘Poetry and Violence’? Can you justify his definition with regards to his poetry?
Find examples in one or two poems.
From 'Poetry and Violence':
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'?
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. [...]
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.
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 far-reaching 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.
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 life-bringing 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 farreaching, but now considered entirely good.
positive
dancer
Conversion of Saul to Paul
Media: ‘sex and violence’ Violation / sacrilege
negative
Thrushes
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
From 'Poetry and Violence':
More coiled steel than living - a poised
But any reader who hangs on to the plotted course and argument
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
of the poem will surely find something different. Considering the
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce,
three images - Thrush, Mozart's brain and Shark - as
a stab
hieroglyphs, only one has a clear self-evident meaning. So that
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
one is the key to the others. Mozart's composing brain - the lump
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
of animal brain tissue producing Mozart's music - has a single
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
plain meaning: divine activity in something fleshly. However
And a ravening second.
else we interpret the image, our ideas revolve around this fixed,
central axis of meaning. [...]
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Neither Thrush nor Shark can properly be defined by
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
the weak, loose negative meaning of 'violent'. There are several
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
factors in each situation contradicting that sense. The Thrush is
Purpose? Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's mouth
doing what it has evolved to do, and is feeding its young as well.
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
The Shark is doing what it has evolved to do and what uniquely
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
determines everything about it, but has been tricked, in
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
innocence, to turn the activity against itself, unknowing. So other
Or obstruction deflect.
meanings open up in both mages. [...]
It is not unorthodox to see that there is a clear and
With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
strong sense in which both Thrush and Shark are obeying - in
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
selfless, inspired (i.e. lucid) obedience, like Mozart's brain - the
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
creator's law which shaped their being and their inborn activity.
For years: his act worships itself - while for him,
And they are obeying it with that effortless instantaneity which is
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and
a 'divine' characteristic, also, of Mozart's composition.
above what
This is where what the critics called 'poetry of
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
[negative] violence' begins to assert its credentials as poetry of
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
positive violence, poetry about the working of divine law in
Of black silent waters weep.
created things. [...]
3) Now find your own definitions of the same word using a good dictionary. Go back to the same poems that you have just looked
at, read them again, and revise or extend your former opinion.
Violent adj 1(a) using, showing or caused by strong (esp unlawful) physical force: violent criminals, a violent attack (b) using, showing or
caused by intense emotion: violent passions 2 severe or extreme: violent winds, violent toothache
Violence n 1(a) violent conduct, esp of an unlawful kind: outbreaks of violence (b) great emotional intensity 2 severity of harshness: the
violence of the gale