But Who is Stronger Than Death? Ted Hughes, evidently.

 

This hardback edition of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes is my most treasured possession. I was given it as a leaving present by my friends and colleagues at the Notting Hill branch of Waterstones in London, all the way back in October 2003. I’d worked there for only a year or so, but it was the among the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it was a sad day when I learned recently that the branch is now defunct.

 As can be seen above, everyone signed the endpapers for me, and to this day I can remember them all exactly. One of the many drawbacks of moving around a lot when you’re younger is that you end to replace one group of friends with another, and it becomes harder to stay in touch with the people you leave behind. Anyway, to Ian, Gilles, Mette, Serene, Freddie and (especially) Kirstin – I hope you’re all doing well, wherever you are.

This collected volume had just been published that year, and although I’d been a Ted Hughes obsessive for about a decade there was much in it that I hadn’t read before. I can’t remember the exact moment I became aware of Hughes, but it was almost certainly through reading Sylvia Plath when I was a teenager. (Although now I think of it, I had read his superb children’s book The Iron Man when I was about seven, so Hughes is probably the writer with whom I’ve had the longest relationship.) There’s an inevitable, prurient fascination in the darkness and tragedy that surrounds Hughes’s life, and we may as well get it out of the way here. As everyone knows, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and Hughes was blamed for it for decades. His lover Assia Wevill then committed suicide in 1969, in identical circumstances to Plath, killing their four year-old daughter Shura before taking her own life. The idea that Hughes was some patriarchal monster forcing these women to kill themselves was common currency in some critical circles for decades, but I think it was definitively cut off by the publication of his late collection Birthday Letters in 1998, and by the publication of his selected letters in 2007. All of the above is biography and gossip, not literature, although it’s clear the colossal emotional pain Hughes suffered from these tragedies fed into his darkest writings in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Seamus Heaney called Hughes ‘a guardian spirit of the land and the language,’ a poet who ‘internalised the historical crises of the British nation and the ecological crises of planet earth’, and it was this completeness of poetic vision that first drew me to his work; his vivid strangeness, the perspective on the natural world that was somehow both tender and fierce, alive to violence and death at the same time as seeing those struggles as inherent and valuable parts of a greater and eternal whole. I suspect most readers of Hughes find initial value in his animal poems and his poetry of the natural world, the early lyrics from his first collections The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. Poems like the much-anthologised ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Jaguar’, or ‘Pike’ and ‘Wind’ show this early gift for embodiment and a richly unsentimental sympathy. Sometimes it feels as if this perspective is more empathetic than sympathetic, as though it’s coming from within the natural world rather than being imposed on it from outside. Alice Oswald, the clearest inheritor of Hughes’s mantle, describes him as less of a natural poet than a preternatural one, his animals emerging from some dark, metamorphic space, changed by his knowledge of the deep roots of mythology and folklore. The startling adjectives and adverbs imbue these creatures with shocking strangeness; they are estranged from our common, desultory understanding of them. The jaguar in his cage ‘[…] hurrying enraged/Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes/On a short fierce fuse’. A sparrow ‘whets his stub weapon’ on a branch in ‘Sunday Evening’, and in ‘Thrushes’ the birds seem less like humble garden visitors than heralds of cataclysm: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,/More coiled steel than living’.

It would be a mistake to see the Hughesian eye in this period turned only to the animal life that surrounded him though. Contemporary politics was of no interest, but Hughes had an unusually intense identification with the bloody horrors and sacrifices of the First World War, which puts him in much closer communion with the war poets Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones and Robert Graves (especially the last two) than you might think. Hughes’s father and uncle were both veterans of that war, and he often spoke of how the Yorkshire valleys where he grew up, well into the 1950s, still seemed in deep mourning for the local boys who had been killed. Poems like ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Six Young Men’ are superb imaginative engagements with battle and human suffering, exploring with anger and compassion the experiences of men like his father.

The prevalence of mythology and folklore in Hughes’s poetry began to intensify into the late 1960s. His 1967 collection Wodwo initialled the change, a combination of poetry and short stories that seems formally inventive for the period. (‘Rain Horse’, later reprinted in the story collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom, is one of the best short stories ever written.) It was 1970’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow that solidified Hughes’s deepening and incredibly dark obsession with the lineaments of folk tales and myth, something that continued for much of the decade that followed. The sequence is an unstable text, with Hughes adding and subtracting individual poems from it, hiving some of them off to other collections, or keeping handfuls sequestered in either limited edition pamphlets or uncollected altogether. It was intended to be an epic folk-tale, with Crow as a trickster figure, cowardly and selfish, created by God in some horrified impulse; ‘a black rainbow/Bent in emptiness’, ‘Screaming for Blood/Grubs, crusts/Anything’. Creation itself is a horror, a roiling arena of sexual depravity and bloodshed, investigated by Crow in all his mocking curiosity. This solidification (some would say ossification) of Hughes’s interests and themes  from a natural to a mythological world has an attendant loosening of form. The Crow poems are not so much free verse as a destruction of poetic form and a rough stitching of it back together, in lines and stanzas of savage violence, black irony and bitter sarcasm. The poems are difficult, ugly in places, thrilling, disturbing – ripe for parody in many ways, as only the most stylistically distinct work can be. Hughes was to stick with this more abrasive style in works like Cave Birds, inspired by the grotesque, caricatural work of his friend, the artist Leonard Baskin, and in what might be the strangest book ever written; 1977’s Gaudete. A loosely versified narrative, Gaudete recounts the abduction of an Anglican clergyman into the underworld and his replacement by a duplicate changeling crafted from a rotten tree stump, who then goes on to minister to his parishioners in a distinctly sexual manner. To say that by this point we’re a far cry from the intimate natural histories of The Hawk in the Rain would be something of an understatement.

Hughes’s work slowly returned to a richer and more intimate engagement with his subjects though, the apocalyptic and alchemical interests becoming more restrained (as in his 1989 collection Wolfwatching), and the natural world explored and recreated through more a tender, caressing observation. ‘A Cranefly in September’ is a work of both intimately close detail and visionary transformation, the titular insect ‘blundering with long strides, long reachings’ as it traverses a patch of grass, the poet’s eye imbuing it with a greater valence as he notes ‘Her jointed bamboo fuselage’ and ‘the simple colourless church windows of her wings’. In the end, after adorning the insect with a kaleidoscope of similes and images, and personalising it as ‘her’, the cranefly must also be seen as an evolved creature of matter and chemicals fulfilling its instinctual function: ‘The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate/To plot her through the infinities of the stems.’

Remains of Elmet and River return Hughes to the landscapes of his childhood, while Season Songs, a collection written ‘in hearing’ of children, and Moortown Diary reflect his growing involvement with farming and agriculture. Moortown Diary is surely one of the greatest collections about man’s engagement with the land ever written, an intimate portrait of the bloody realities of farming life that nevertheless finds a strange calm and equipoise in the rough business of dehorning cattle, shearing sheep, and overseeing the birth of calves, ‘Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb’. It is about man’s often vexed relationship not with landscape, but the land; a needed thing, obdurate and stubborn, a dishcloth that must be wrung out for the very last drop of human sustenance.

This balance and contrast between the shamanic Hughes and the Wordsworthian keeper of the land meant that he is probably the only major poet since Tennyson to have made a success of the Laureateship, when he was appointed in 1984. He spoke of the position in explicitly shamanic terms; if the crown is the symbol of the unity of the tribe, then the Laureate can represent and give voice to the spiritual unity of that tribe. Unpromising occasions like the christening of Prince Harry produced poems like ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, a rushing, water-soaked work that flows through the rivers and streams that pour across Devon, an incantatory roll-call of river names that seems to make an implicit, Arthurian connection between the fertility of the crown and the fertility of the land. In a letter from 1979, Hughes noted that all creative work to him was ‘a conjuration, a ritual summoning of all energies associated with the subject matter’.

Two more great works were to follow before his death in 1998. The nourishing, imaginative topography of myth hadn’t left him, and in Tales From Ovid Hughes turned to one of the original sources, adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rich, indecorous poems of an overwhelming blank verse that feels hewn out of stone. Here capricious gods wield infinite power, the transformations of man to animal a metamorphosis of unrivalled horror. Even Martin Amis (a natural Philip Larkin man more than a Ted Hughes man) called the book ‘masterful.’ It was 1998’s Birthday Letters though that sealed the poetic career and capped this later flowering of genius. It was the first time he had engaged in his work with the suicide of Sylvia Plath, and it was clear from this collection of stunned conversations, unflinching and interrogatory, that he had been working on it since her death in 1963. The book was a colossal bestseller, but even if people were reading it for prurient reasons they could not have been unaffected by the emotional power of Hughes’s verse. It won every prize going, and as if to underline its significance as his last word on the matter, he died of cancer only nine months later. Typically, he suspected he had contracted the disease because he had spent too much time writing prose, instead of poetry.

Of all his works Birthday Letters has the most emotional resonance for me. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the shallow, tote-bag slogan idea that literature can be ‘healing’, or that it has some magical analgesic effect (as if a d headache can be shifted by a dose of Shakespeare instead of two paracetamol and a glass of water), but Birthday Letters was one of the only books I could read in the aftermath of my mother’s death in 2012. I would get up early every day that summer and sit in the garden at my father’s house, drinking a coffee and reading and re-reading this book, unable to let it go. It was an anchor in many ways, a lifejacket. It felt like Hughes was invocating his grief directly into my heart, and that this shared sorrow was somehow both deepening my own grief and making it more bearable. The poems are concentrated moments, flickers of disbelief and understanding, roving attempts to find meaning in detail and significance in the half-remembered and the painfully exact. The language is sometimes plain, sometimes achingly beautiful. On his first meeting with Plath, in ‘St Botolph’s’, accompanied by another lover: ‘Falcon Yard:/Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow’, or in the starkly titled ‘Error’: ‘I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland./I sleepwalked you/Into my land of totems.’ The collection gives a retrospective understanding to Hughes’s entire body of work, that he was in many ways trying to exorcise deaths that he felt responsible for. In the folkloric mode that he made his own, the condemned man must descend into the underworld in order to be transformed. Here, Hughes is plummeting into his memories, his guilt and grief. He is bringing back the brightest ore, and like a blacksmith is hammering it into astonishing new shapes.

The idea of having a ‘favourite writer’ is a bit reductive, a Top Trumps approach to literature that denies what makes any writer most engaging. Different writers, different books, provide different experiences, and it’s the collective, multivalent voice that most attracts. I could no more take only one book to a desert island than I could take nothing, but if I was forced to choose then perhaps this hardback of Ted Hughes’s collected poems would come with me. He is the complete writer in terms of how much he has infiltrated my imagination and affected the way I view the world, both outside and inside. He is not just a poet or a critic, but a vehicle for the English language, a storehouse of all its richness and power, recharged from the abyssal wellsprings of myth and folklore. There’s something almost autochthonous about him, and his voice is woven through all the thickets of my obsessions and interests. Like Martin Amis (his antithesis, in many ways), he writes with originality, euphony and force of expression; for me, the triumvirate of aesthetic virtues. Michael Hofmann, another poet and critic I revere, boldly said that Hughes was the greatest English poet since Shakespeare. Appropriately, the one book of his I haven’t read is his incredibly idiosyncratic 1992 critical study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I plan to read it this summer, and perhaps then, once I’ve absorbed everything by him, I’ll move on from my Ted Hughes obsession. But I suspect not.

‘There is no better way to know us/Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.’