This is a powerful and clarifying study, richly layered and compelling. Ted was very often near broke after deciding to live only off his poetry.
Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
He was easy to satirise but then so was one of his greatest heroes, Wordsworth. What matters is the good that remains and in both their cases there is so much that is so good.
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- Whitman v. Dickinson;
- Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life review – a man smouldering with life | Books | The Guardian.
Like Wordsworth, he came from a northern grammar school to Cambridge and it was there that he met Sylvia Plath, the beautiful American poet and scholar who had read the poems he had published at university and went for him the first time she saw him. This was at a party where they danced and drank and he kissed her neck and in return she bit his cheek with such force that it bled. She ignored the girl he had brought with him to the party. Plath went from the bright student into a stellar comparison with Emily Dickinson. After six years, he left her. Some time afterwards, she moved back to London.
Her suicide took her away from Ted but he never could be taken away from her for the rest of his life. It is a fair use of a cliche to say that she haunted him. He took care of her work and published it meticulously. Like the rest of the literary world, he stood back in amazement as Ariel and The Bell Jar achieved such record-shattering success. Then he stood back in horror as a brutal wing of the new uncompromising feminist movement described him as a murderer and a rapist, and destroyed as many readings as they could, as well as desecrating her grave because the word Hughes was included in her name.
He was imprisoned in the simplified cell of woman-hater. No matter that she had attempted suicide before she met him and turned to others after he left her, no matter that to understand the cause of suicide demands knowledge way beyond the capacity of those who build a case on a few external circumstances and rancid prejudice. He was condemned and that has not gone away.
But it never stopped him writing and in secret he began his great act of atonement. He not only hid this, he found a way to intensify the passions that drove him. More writing, more women, sometimes two or even three, not knowing which to choose or why, feeling like Jonathan Swift that it was possible to love more than one woman at the same time. His partnership with Assia Wevill was again passionate but, like Sylvia, she too gassed herself, this time taking their four-year-old child with her.
Or should we more correctly say murdering the child? But of course to Hughes-haters, he was the sole culprit. Total passion was his only way. And when he married Carol Orchard, the passion was there too, but there was also the relief of knowing that he was with someone non-competitive, like Valerie in the life of TS Eliot, somebody who would care for him whatever. They lived in Devon.
But Carol was there at the end. Yet throughout the post-Plath years the force that fed the man took him into complex work with Peter Brook, on their co-written play Orghast , through a devastating court trial in America to defend the reputation of Sylvia Plath, and to keep near to his Yorkshire family and his two children by Plath, Frieda and Nick, to whom he became exceptionally close.
En passant, he netted many of the leading European poets and brought them to England for translation and for poetry readings. He developed a complex and most fulfilling friendship with Seamus Heaney who came to him in awe and admiration. To meet, he was in every way the commanding presence in the room, any room.
Whitman v. Dickinson
Switching from a demanding interiority to great laughter, to drinking, to good talk — no small talk, no gossip. Towards the end he embraced the shape-changing genius of Ovid and drew the important admiration of another key critic, John Carey. Then came the great work to which he had given so much of himself over the years, Birthday Letters , which became the fastest-selling book of poetry there had ever been.
He tore up his shame by the roots and in public.
Alison Jaenicke, Penn State University
He showed his grievous wounds and put on view the compacted impossibility of grief, love and separation. Just as I believe he helped her in her life towards writings that will last as long as the finest poetry, so she in her death gave him the keys to that kingdom. She is in the carriage with death and immortality.
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This further reveals that the author has come to terms with her own mortality. She has set down all she wanted to do in life, and willingly entered the carriage with Death and Immortality. She may be aware that had she not gone willingly, they would have taken her captive nonetheless, but this does not seem to alter her perception of the two characters as kind, thoughtful, and even gentle.
This is portrayed as Death drives slowly for her, allowing her to reminisce. He takes her through the course of her life with a slow and patient ride. Immortality rides along, but is silent. We passed the school, where children strove At recess, in the ring; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun.
Then they pass the setting sun. The sunset is beautiful and gentle, and the passing from life to eternity is portrayed as such. Or rather, he passed us; The dews grew quivering and chill, For only gossamer my gown, My tippet only tulle.
There is a sudden shift in tone in the fourth stanza. Suddenly, now that the sun has set, the author realizes that she is quite cold, and she shivers. Then she becomes aware that she is under dressed. Prior to this moment of realization, the author felt quite comfortable with Death and Immortality. In the first through third stanzas, the author is on close affectionate terms with Death and Immortality. Describing Death as a gentleman suitor who is kind and civil, she shows no shame at being under dressed.
However, when the sun sets, and the cold damp sets in, she becomes aware of her inappropriate attire. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. The tone becomes one of disappointment, as the author realizes that death is not all she thought it would be.