Book chapter 685 views
Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins
John Goodby
Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture, Pages: 177 - 194
Swansea University Author: John Goodby
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DOI (Published version): 10.1007/978-3-319-97574-0_11
Abstract
Drawing on the pioneering work of the critic James Keery, I argue that the origins of Hughes's style, use of form and poetic philosophy are deeply imbricated in the work of late 1940s New Apocalypse and Neo-Romantic poetry. This work - by the likes of Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes, Kathleen Raine,...
| Published in: | Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture |
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| ISBN: | 978-3-319-97573-3 978-3-319-97574-0 |
| Published: |
Switzerland
Palgrave Macmillan
2018
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa49124 |
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| Abstract: |
Drawing on the pioneering work of the critic James Keery, I argue that the origins of Hughes's style, use of form and poetic philosophy are deeply imbricated in the work of late 1940s New Apocalypse and Neo-Romantic poetry. This work - by the likes of Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes, Kathleen Raine, Lynette Roberts, Alun Lewis, W. S. Graham - was derided by Movement ideologues and Oxbridge critics in the 1950s, a hostility renewed in the late 1970s and persisting to the present day. The level of hostility, I argue, has meant that Hughes's champions have been far too reluctant to link him to the poetic context out of which he actually emerged for fear that he will suffer guilt by association with the allegedly 'dire decade'. The chapter follows Keery in re-evaluating 1940s poetry; it argues that Hughes himself was, up to a point, cautious in acknowledging this lineage, but was nevertheless more upfront about it than his critics. It is also argued that, like the 1940s writers, he is best viewed as belonging to a long-established apocalyptic strain in British poetry which includes W. B. Yeats and William Blake. The 1940s Apocalyptic influence on Hughes was all the stronger because it was often allied with regionalist commitments, as in the work of Norman Nicholson (whose 'Egremont' is compared to Hughes's 'Snowdrop'), and Hughes's attraction to the 'Celtic' and Robert Graves's The White Goddess is touched on. The main comparison is between Hughes and Dylan Thomas, seen as initially intimidatory but then enabling in Hughes's early work - the transition between the two modes of influence occurring in 1954, and charted in the difference between 'The Little Boys and the Seasons' and 'The Jaguar. In its final section, the chapter considers Hughes as the maverick poet whom mainstream English poetry adopted in the 1960s and 1970s out of fear of something more radical, poet of the 'the ambivalent establishment' |
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| Keywords: |
Ted Hughes, Apocalypse, Dylan Thomas, James Keery, mid-century British poetry, Blake, Yeats, nuclear weapons, Literature, Modern 20th century. |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
177 |
| End Page: |
194 |