TED HUGHES

ASPECTS OF HIS POETRY

Discuss Ted Hughes as a poet of violence.

Ted Hughes has written a large number of poems which depict violence- violence, chiefly of
savage animals, but violence also in human nature. Indeed, violence is one of the dominant themes
in Hughes’ poetry and for this reason, he has been regarded as a poet of violence. Hughes can see
even more clearly and unambiguously than Tennyson: “Nature red in tooth and claw”.

However, those who describe him primarily as a poet of violence, do not intend to use this label
as a tribute to him. They regard the theme of violence in his poetry as something abnormal and
undesirable. But Hughes himself equated the word “violence” with what he called ‘vehement
activity’ or ‘energy’. In an interview, he said:

“My poems are not about violence but about vitality. Animals are not violent; they are so much
more completely controlled than men.”

But without any hair-splitting we must acknowledge the fact that Hughes does depict violence in
many of his poems and does so in a brutal and naked shape. No poet of the past has been able to
convey the murderousness of nature with such economy and such effect as Hughes did. For
instance, in ‘Hawk Roosting’, the bird says to himself:

“I kill where I please because it is all mine.”

Poems like Jaguar, Ester’s Tomcat, View of a Pig, Pike etc. depict animal violence, while poems
like Bayonet Charge, Six Young Men and The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar depict human violence.
The bloody-mindedness depicted in poems like Ester’s Tomcat and View of a Pig shows the effect
of the historical events of 20th century namely- the effect of the Blitz, the Bomb and the Auschwitz.
According to M. L. Rosenthal, Hughes’s view of Nature is Nazi, not Wordsworthian. According
to M. G. Ramanan, the violent imagery in Hughes’s poems shows the continuation of the English
sense of Imperialism and is closely allied to authoritarian politics. John Lucas observes in his
Modern English Poetry, that poetry is a “murderous art” and hence, it should take risks and the
only modem English poet who fulfils this condition is Ted Hughes who has broken a new ground
by dealing with dark, psychic, violent forces in modern life.

In any case, there is no need to offer any apology on Hughes’s behalf for writing such poems.
Everything under the sky is a fit material for the poets if they have the required technical skill to
arouse reader’s curiosity or to instruct, thrill or delight the reader by their poems. The poems of
violence by Hughes are certainly genuine poetry and they are enjoyed not only by the sadistic
persons among us, but also by the normal reader because they are perfectly realistic and vivid in
their description of brutality and cruelty.
Discuss Ted Hughes’ use of myths in his poetry.

According to John West, a myth may be regarded as an archaic superstition. Every poet, according
to West, is a myth-maker, who renames the world by re-ordering familiar words or making new
ones. By putting words, words with new meanings, the poet may articulate mythic utterances in
his poems. Ted Hughes, also shows a deep interest in primitive beliefs and superstitions and in
writing of his poems, he frequently draws upon ancient myths and legends. For instance, in the
poem The Hawk in The Rain, Hughes has brought together the extraordinary experience of the
Hawk’s eye and the man struggling through mud in plough-land. The poet here, performs a mythic
task in the sense that through this poem, he seeks to bridge Nature’s tremendous power and the
human weakness of a man plodding through mud. In this way, both mythic naming and mythic
narrative, aim to join man and experience, and to challenge, accommodate, or heal, the sense of
exclusion provoked by the hawk’s eye.

Throwing light on the reason behind using myths in his poetry, Hughes says that the human mind
has been rejecting religion as a fraud because of the scientific progress and at the same time, the
human mind has also been discarding the inner world of man as a bundle of fairy tales and as a
relic of primeval superstition. Without religion, the energies of instinct and feeling in man have
been dehumanized and the whole inner world has become chaotic, more primitive, beyond our
control. The result of all this according to Hughes, is a culture out of touch with Nature or in
touch with Nature in a very narrow way. Thus, Nature becomes, beyond this narrow conception,
elemental chaotic and dangerous. In a sense, this is how Nature appears through the hawk’s eye.
Freudian psychology, says Hughes, cures mentally sick persons by bringing into their conscious
minds what had been repressed by them and what had therefore, travelled down into their
subconscious mind where it wreaks havoc.

The best way to bring these repressed feelings into conscious mind is to give them shape and thus
let them play a part in our conscious lives. This can be done by means of myths and fantasies and
thus, says Hughes, the devil dwelling in subconscious mind can be tamed. Thus, a myth, in
Hughes’ poetry is the objectified story of psychic healing or taming the devil. The poet is thus a
medicine man or “shaman”, using myths to accomplish his mission of healing or dispelling fear or
insecurity from the minds of human beings. And the poet restores not only others’ mental health,
but helps himself also to do the same.