Ted Hughes (1930–1998)

Is this simultaneously one of the greatest poems Hughes wrote and one of the most puzzling? Unequivocally, yes. Indeed, let's go further and assert those attributes apply to 'Gaudete' not just in the context of the work of Hughes but in that of the whole of post-war poetry in English. This will be a deeply controversial opinion in 2023 I know. Apart from arguing on literary merits there is the subject matter of the poem (if of course one can maintain a questionable abstract distance and separate the two).

It's perhaps unsurprising that Hughes felt obliged to preface 'Gaudete' with an 'Argument':

An Anglican Clergyman, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is carried away into the other world by elemental spirits...
To fill his place in this world, for the time of his absence, the spirits make an exact duplicate of him out of an oak log, and fill it with elemental spirit life...
This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of love in his own log-like way.
He organises the women of his parish into a coven, a love-society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is the birth of a Messiah to be fathered by Lumb.

If that sounds odd and off-putting, I would understand both points of view but I nevertheless agree with John Bayley, writing a few years after its publication, that 'Gaudete' is 'one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry,'

Bayley goes on to say that part of the achievement of the poem is how 'fantasy – the very odd tale or legend that preoccupied the author – is made as real as life on the farm.' How Hughes brilliantly effects this is absolutely the most striking aspect but also from a technical point of view formally 'Gaudete' is remarkable. The nature and structure of the verse is brilliantly developed, its effortless shifting utterly organic, often achieving a completely graceful elision from prose to verse and back. Above all, it is the most dramatic and disturbing recreation of the Dionysos/Bacchae myth I have ever read. One of the epigraphs to the poem is from Heraclitus to the effect that Hades and Dionysos are one - and (paraphrasing) that therefore, one has to expect shocking things to occur. The whole poem feels as if it takes place not quite in its ostensible very English rural village setting but in some liminal space adjacent to it in which very brutal, amoral things are commonplace. (Although the incongruity of 'The Archers' meets Ovid is brilliantly done and not without considerable humour in places). This is profoundly unsettling and the depiction of the violence which is inseparable from Hughes' vision is necessarily difficult to read. But for me it remains a masterpiece for its Ovidian and Shakespearean reimagining. I understand this might be a divisive view - it's a testimony to my reaction to what I have read and not an argument, rhetorical or otherwise to persuade you to take a different view or even necessarily to read it.

It's a shock to pick up the 2003 'Collected Poems' and find that only the 'Epilogue' poems are included. Particularly as the later reprinting of the poem contains a longer, (sort of) clearer version of the 'Argument' for example, which suggests to me that Hughes was trying to engender a greater understanding of the work. To omit one of his most significant and extraordinary achievements from his 'Collected Poems' is a major decision. It's unclear what led Paul Keegan to do this. We know when Hughes was alive he included only some of the 'Epilogue poems' and no extract from the main poem in the 'Selected Poems' Faber put out in 1981. But this decision is explicable surely on the grounds that he didn't feel he wanted to break up what is a notably sustained piece of work. It doesn't follow at all that he somehow wanted this expunged from his canon in the same way Auden did with 'The Orators' for example.

Incidentally the ebook is of the later version of the poem (with the cut down version of the 'Argument' at the start). It fails to format a lot of the verse properly and indefensibly - does nobody at Faber think it worth employing someone with at least intermediate HTML skills?. The 'Epilogue poems' are also rendered, inexplicably, in a much larger font size. Unbelievably sloppy. I purchased this beautiful original edition (paperback but with the Baskin cover) after returning the Kindle one for a refund.… (more)

I want to reject received critical opinion about this book, namely that it is a slightly deranged example of Shakespearian hermeneutics, which would never have been published were it not for Hughes' reputation and so Faber's acquiescence. One knows one might be fighting against the tide however when the best that even a generous, fair. and extremely perceptive critic such as Seamus Perry can say is that this is a book of 'reckless charm'.

Nevertheless: you can reject the book's central framework of the 'tragic equation' (an actually quite complex linking of ancient myth to the tumultuous repercussions which were still being felt in Shakespeare's lifetime of England's move from being a Catholic state to a Protestant one, with 'Venus and Adonis' the first expression of the 'catholic' part of the equation and 'The Rape of Lucrece' its counterpart as the myth of Puritanism) if you want but that still shouldn't then obscure the fact that this book is deeply original and contains some of the most interesting writing on Shakespeare produced in the thirty or so years since its publication. In saying this I also note how easily one slips into and reproduces the language Hughes uses - starting of course with 'equation' - but again this is just terminology which oughtn't distract. As he said in a letter just prior to the publication of the book: 'my concepts are like philosophical or mathematical terms...but the book grew as an imaginative work'

So, brilliant, striking, innovative, creative. In places. Especially the first half of the book. The main problem for me is that second half of the book becomes extremely repetitive and Hughes' obsession with tying in more and more of the equation does start to wear, especially as the equation itself starts to expand and become a 'theophany' (and this part of the book is the only reading - of 'The Winter's Tale' - which I think especially perverse). But Hughes on 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' is brilliant, as is his analysis of so called 'problem plays' such as 'All's Well that Ends Well' , 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'Measure for Measure'.

Hughes famously gave up reading English at Cambridge and switched to Anthropology after a vivid dream which changed slightly in his various tellings and recollections but which is immortalised in 'The Thought Fox'. In the dream a large fox walked into his room (after Hughes had fallen asleep failing to complete an essay), laid a bleeding paw on the page where Hughes was writing and said: 'Stop this – you are destroying us.' This book is a tantalising example of criticism and analysis freed from the Leavisite approach Hughes was being taught, which the fox decried, but also anything that has come since. It shows simply the possibilities of an open, widely read, mind[^1]. Does it matter that it becomes dogmatic and outstays its welcome? Not to me, I would not be without its living witness to Hughes vital iconoclasm, realised in 1992 in this book over 30 years after 'The Thought Fox', some of whose lines might have been added to the collection of epigraphs the book already has:

.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.… (more)

Honestly, I could write thousands of words of why this is a horrible horrible collection, but I haven't the time to waste on a review that no-one is going to read, so here's the short version. This work presents itself as a commentary on Plath and Hughes' relationship with the implication that the poems were written in real time. I don't believe this. I think this is a reputation washing exercise and therefore a different type of dishonesty than is usual in poetry. We learn nothing significant about either person, Plath or Hughes, that we couldn't have already guessed, but the arrogance and cruelty shown by Hughes in this collection regularly took my breath away. He never shows any sign of attempting to understand her mental health issues, or reflect on his own feelings about those issues. She is reduced a madwoman, a raving creature obsessed for reasons unclear with her own father, a compulsive unreflective beast dedicated to being difficult and getting in the way of him writing Important Poetry. Her behaviours are not rational or based on any set of values, they're just childish tantrums that hurt random people around here, like the imagined English countryman setting traps to catch rabbits for his pot that she starves by tearing up the snares - he gaslights her from beyond the grave, her moral values are fake whilst his are unimpeachable. Their chidren are often mentioned, but only once are either of them refered to as 'his' or 'my', otherwise only 'her', but the children's feelings or lives are not touched on, only their existence refered to obliquely to draw attention to her failings are a parent. He shows no interest in the lives of their chilren or their inner worlds, just uses them as a stick to beat her with. There are so many mocking references to Daddy and Ariel, but no engagement with the works. This is a world in which a woman's trauma is treated as a personality flaw, her bpd is treated as difficulties and troublemaking. I have seen so many people like him in my professional life, they are everything we seek to change about the world and their refusal to understand trauma and psychiatry or do any self-reflection is a major problem in the interpersonal lives of so many people. There is oh so much more, my copy has dozens of corners turned over, stickies put in to show things to raise, notes made in anger. I am a fan of Ted Hughes' work, but this is cruelty pretending to be neutrality, insults pretending to be artistic neutrality, and worst of all, there are very few poems in here that are Hughes at his best. Perhaps the best poem in the book is Wuthering Heights, or maybe The Minotaur, but mostly they are cold, like adverts, like PR bumpf, showing only excerpted versions of the human experience. Poems should make you see things in a new way, good poems should reveal the truths of the world in ways you never imagined. Not a single poem in this collection made my blood pump harder, made me exited, made me read the work out loud to my partner excitedly. There were some good poems, certainly. Hughes skill is undeniable, but there were so few moments in this where his descriptions, his rhythm, his vision grabbed me and surprised me, only depressed me with his art, a great painter leaving a portrait to posterity that is a grotesquery, handing on hatred as truth to posterity. I feel so sorry for Sylvia Plath, being handpicked as a trophy wife by a selfish man who didn't understand her and didn't want to, who felt attacked by the existence of an emotional life that was inconvenient to him, and then having her pain and art turned into mocking and dismissive poems. There is nothing in this book that tells you anything about why he loved her, what he liked about her, the good times they had together, the work they created during their relationship, how he felt and why, what she said about her subjects, their courtship, why they got married, why they had children, a whole relationship reduced to 60 or so bitter vignettes of him having the arse with her. It's the poetry equivalent of a man explaining that his ex is a nutter and you shouldn't believe anything she says. Horrible stuff, sometimes very good in a technical kind of way but mostly the only thing I felt was annoyance.… (more)