Christopher Reid, editor
Letters of Ted Hughes.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 784 pages, $45

After the success of Sylvia Plath’s book of poetry, Ariel, and her novel, The Bell Jar, feminists came to view Plath as their saint and martyr. Her husband, Ted Hughes (1930–1998), became the prototype of everything rotten about men as well as a demonic embodiment of everything America does not understand about the Old World, England in particular. Hughes was reviled by Plath devotees like Paul Alexander, who has been (literally) retailing the story of Plath as victim in his sensational and wildly inaccurate biography Rough Magic, and in a play called Edge which had a successful run on the New York stage a few years back. Reviewing the play in The Villager, Jeremy Tallmer wrote, “Every woman in the world—every woman who can read—knows, or believes, that Sylvia Plath went to her death, leaving behind their two young children, because she had been ditched and coldly mistreated by her husband, the British poet (later Poet Laureate) Ted Hughes.” More extreme subscribers to the Plath cult repeatedly chiseled the name Hughes off her tombstone in Yorkshire. (Readers who wish to explore this subject are directed to the chapter called “Digging for the Truth about Sylvia Plath” in my 2004 book, Poetry and What Is Real.) Guardians of the Plath shrine will no doubt interrogate his selected letters, just published, for evidences of Hughes as villain.

Largely as a result of the Plath fantasia, Hughes is not generally accorded the same level of respect and acclaim here that has been considered his due in the British Isles ever since the publication of The Hawk in the Rain fifty years ago. In Britain he is justly regarded as one of the great twentieth-century masters, appointed Poet Laureate in 1985 to succeed John Betjeman, another English poet worth knowing better. In part, this lack of recognition reflects the estrangement that exists between our two literary cultures: “two nations,” as the saying often attributed to Shaw puts it, “divided by a common language.”

Anyone with an interest in England and English poetry should get to know Hughes’s letters. Selected and edited by Christopher Reid, they run to over 700 pages, and Reid asserts that “An edition in three or four volumes, each just as big, could have been assembled, with the guarantee that no page would have been without its literary or documentary value.” I would welcome further collections of Hughes’s letters; what we have here makes for fascinating reading. Like many people we characterize with that peculiar word “genius,” Ted Hughes was prodigiously energetic, interested in any astounding number of subjects, immensely prolific.

Reading them, and reading Hughes’s poetry alongside them, makes one realize that the England Hughes inhabited, both literally and imaginatively, was not the England we in America tend to be familiar with—an England brilliantly served up to us in the plays of Noel Coward and Harold Pinter, the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Amis père et fils, the poetry of W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, and Philip Larkin, the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, films starring actors like Hugh Grant and Simon Callow.

While all the artists I have named give me immense pleasure, Hughes’s England is a place where polish and refinement, wit, high culture, the with-it and cutting-edge count for less than qualities one might describe as essential, primal—the English countryside as opposed to various civilized milieux. There is tradition aplenty in Hughes’s England and a sense of history embedded not in manners, ceremony, and institutions, but in human nature, in the land itself, its seasonal rhythms, the hard truths of the struggle between predator and prey. Hughes is in touch with “deep history,” strands of which precede the coming of Christianity, not to mention the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries and any number of epoch-making events. One catches a glimpse of it in these lines from “Pike,” a favorite of mine for over forty years:

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England… .

Hughes had strong convictions, ideas, and theories—obsessions is a word he himself uses—on many subjects including translation, which he championed and practiced with notable results, and on being a father who raised two children from infancy, an expert fisherman, a writer for theater and radio, and an advocate for cultural issues in Britain. It’s hard to know where to start in describing the range of these letters. For one thing, he was a convinced believer in astrology—not of the “What’s your sign?” variety, but a real student of the ancient system who cast charts and repeatedly advised his publishers as to the most propitious dates for his books to appear. As a student of anthropology and myth at Cambridge, he was one of the first to perceive the parallels between the shaman and the poet. This identification has lost some of its bite now that both roles tend to be claimed by people who are neither genuine poets nor shamans. For him shamanism was not just a fanciful metaphor.

He approached his task as Poet Laureate in the way a shaman might approach his task of ministering to the health of the land for which he bore responsibility. One can see certain parallels between Hughes’s “alternative” interests, some of which may at first glance seem a bit dotty, and a few of the issues such as organic gardening and the preservation of traditional architectural styles championed by the Prince of Wales, another contemporary Briton who has had his detractors but who in fact has been a sensible advocate for taking an approach to culture that is at the same time “green” and conservative. Prince Charles’s opposition to the hideous new buildings being erected in London—Norman Foster’s infamous “Gherkin” comes to mind—is of a piece with many of the things Hughes championed in his role as public advocate for literacy. In a letter to his daughter, Frieda, who has become a painter and poet, he writes: “T. S. Eliot said to me ‘There’s only one way a poet can develope [sic] his actual writing—apart from self-criticism and continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud—and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e., even if its [sic] in another language). What matters above all, is educating the ear.’” On a related issue, he lobbied the educational authorities to re-introduce memorization into the curriculum.

So in a way, Hughes was the perfect fit as Poet Laureate during these later years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any Laureate poetry that has been truly distinguished: much of it is positively comical. But in a poem like “Rain-Charm for the Duchy,” subtitled “A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry,” one can at least see what Hughes thought he was up to. The poem celebrates the end of a five-month drought, implicitly linking the state of the kingdom with the fertility of the royal family, naming the kingdom’s rivers, in what the Irish call dinnseanachas or evocation of the spirit of the land through recital of place-names, as the drought breaks and the rivers start to flow: “the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down/ Astride bareback ponies, with a cry,/ Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite,/ Flattening rowans and frightening oaks.”

He was convinced that poetry was not the “criticism of life” that Matthew Arnold posited, nor did it fit any of the Aristotelian formulations people have come up with over the years. To Hughes, poetry at its most genuine meant inner work that because it engaged the poet’s psyche at the deepest levels, was capable of affecting readers in the same way, sometimes as a form of spiritual healing. It was not a matter of choosing a style and consciously working within it. This view helps one see Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems as an attempt to exorcize the death-spirit represented by the presence in her psyche of her buried father, who died when she was eight. For the brief period before their marriage foundered, Plath and Hughes were so close that they constituted their own collective unconscious.

As opposed to the popular interpretation that her suicide was the logical consequence of the Ariel poems, in Hughes’s view the exorcism had been successful: she had freed herself in important ways and was ready to live and write. He attributed her suicide to a last-minute surfacing of her demon just at the moment when she had conquered it, combined with a anti-depression medication prescribed by an English doctor unaware that the same drug under a different name had produced suicidal tendencies in Plath while she was living in America. As to the connection between his own writing and his life, in 1998, the year of his death, he wrote to a man doing a paper on him, “I stopped writing stories and radio plays etc. in the 60s because I began to realise that each one foretold an episode in my life—sometimes in quite unbelievable physical detail.”

Naturally, Auden’s assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen” and Larkin’s rejection of what Jung called the collective unconscious as a “myth-kitty” were anathema to Hughes. Likewise he despised the search for technical fluency in poetry. As Roger Kimball observed in these pages in May, 1999, “technique, uncatalysed by sensibili- ty and subject matter, can be the enemy of poetic achievement. In any event, for Auden, technical fluency sometimes resulted in poetry that seemed to proceed on verbal autopilot.” Hughes’s convinced belief in the importance of myth for poetry and its rootedness in the unconscious as interpreted by Jung put Hughes at odds with Auden, whose poetry has its roots in Freud, Marxism, and, finally, Anglo-Catholicism.

In a letter on a review Auden had written about Yeats, Hughes has this to say:

Auden dismissed the whole of Eastern mystical and religious philosophy, the world tradition of Hermetic Magic (which is a good part of Jewish Mystical philosophy, not to speak of the mystical philosophy of the Renaissance), the whole historical exploration into spirit life at every level of consciousness, the whole deposit of earlier and other religion, myth, vision, traditional wisdom and story in folk belief, on which Yeats based all his work, everything he did or attempted to bring about as “embarrassing nonsense.”

These subjects that Auden dismissed out of hand were the cornerstone of Hughes’s poetry.

From adolescence on he was a firm adherent of Robert Graves’s thesis in The White Goddess that all true poets are in thrall to a pre-patriarchal Goddess—the figure of whom Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner writes, “The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,/ who thicks man’s blood with cold.” Responding to questions about The White Goddess from a man writing a paper on him, Hughes replies, “The overall pattern of Goddess-centred matriarchy being overthrown by a God-centred patriarchy was most likely something I first really grasped in the Graves.” Yet he criticizes Graves for his distanced, intellectualized approach: “I think what I resented about Graves was the way he took the Moon, and all the reflections of its properties and its possessions, without ever convincing me that he has done more than perceive their poetic significance… . I can’t ever feel that he experiences them first hand and recreates them in their occult terms.”

Hughes’s little sketches of America and American poets during his and Plath’s brief residency here in the late 1950s are worth the price of the book in themselves. “I met John Crowe Ransom the other week, little whimsical gentle man. He read his poems as you can’t imagine. ‘Wind’ was ‘Wined’ and ‘wounds’ were ‘wownds’—and such a strange grandmotherish story-telling way of speaking them, very good.” And since I began by talking about the gap in understanding between England and America, it seems appropriate to close with some of Hughes’s extravagant and no doubt unfair impressions of our country in the late 1950s:

The great sin in America is “not-to-be-able-to-mix.” … So everybody’s in everybody else’s arms, and all burstingly happy & well-adjusted so far as their facial expressions go. … The houses are splendid here—each in its little grounds. The food, the general opulence, is frightening. My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses—I spit, pee on shrubbery, etc., and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor—just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite so glazed as this one.