Appreciating Ted Hughes

Hawk Roosting: Feet or foot? Photo: Summerdrought [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia

Lupercal by Ted Hughes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I sat down to write about my first reading of this collection of poetry, I drew a blank. I knew nothing of Ted Hughes until he was mentioned in a comment about my reading of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, along with Sylvia Plath. I'd heard of Plath! 

I didn't hate the poetry, nor did I like it. But it seemed strange. I knew it was about animals, but that was the extent of the experience of my first reading. So I took to some research and made some enlightening discoveries.

Hughes was the UK's Poet Laureate, just like Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There had to be something I was missing.

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1995, Hughes mentions a number of issues concerning "The Art of Poetry", such as the differences in drafting verse in handwriting versus typing. In response to the question "Is a poem ever finished?", Hughes mentions a struggle he has had with the singular or plural in the middle of the poem, "Hawk Roosting". Neither worked satisfactorily.

So I start there:

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

And he's right. Swap feet for foot and back again, and neither works grammatically. But it works as it is in the poem.

I tried another poem, "Urn Burial". On the first reading, my mind was clouded by seeing some of the oldest remnants of human urn burials in Bahrain on a visit during my sabbatical in 2009. All I could picture were the skeletal remains curled up in the large stone urns. No animals in sight.

Then, like a 3D picture, the symbolism became clear: Oh, it's a weasel! (It even reads "weasel", but I was off in another dimension.) It started to make sense.

This was not entirely my own doing. I had to digress with Hughes' ars poetica, "The Thought Fox". Hughes basically tells me how to read his poetry. It's very clever, but maybe a little more academic than I was expecting.

Hughes' fascination with animals came from his childhood experience. His older brother, ten years his senior, loved to hunt. Hughes acted as his older brother's retriever and this continued for something like twenty years. Hughes is also famous for his children's books.

Like many readers these days, I had fallen victim to the general decline in reading poetry for fun. (Except epic and didactic poetry such as Homer, Virgil, and Hesiod.)

This year I have read Frank O'Hara, Sir Walter Ralegh, T.S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I am now a convert. I also read Nietzsche's The Gay Science and I am currently reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, both works about poetry. It makes more sense to read poetry more than once, and with some study in between. (Hughes said this in his Paris Review interview, too.)

Had I not read up about Hughes, I would have been none the wiser. And I would certainly be missing out.

The icing on the cake was the name of the collection, Lupercal, is derived from an ancient Roman pastoral or fertility festival, Lupercalia, held annually on my birthday. This made more sense of the numerous classical references that had confused me in my first reading. (The birthday bit gave a surprising personal connection!)

Perhaps I am now a Ted Hughes fan.

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Tennyson: Art imitates life and proves me wrong yet again

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower. Keswick, Gunning 25th December 2018. Photo by Michael de Percy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Alfred Tennyson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Stoics were happy to be proven wrong so that they might root out their own ignorance. Only recently have I begun to really enjoy poetry, and a visit to the bookstore at a time my mind was open brought me to this selection of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1850 following William Wordworth's death. He wasn't the first choice. Not knowing what the position of poet laureate even meant, my class self-consciousness went off on its usual tangent. Typical, an "appointed" artist. State-contrived creativity. What nonsense.

I once felt the same about Hemingway. Americans uber-promoting their own as the best in the world, without considering anyone else, anywhere else. And then I read Islands in the Stream. Wow. And I have since devoured all the works I could find written by Hemingway. He is my favourite author.

So when I purchased this book, I thought I'd give it a go. And then my class-self-consciousness kicked in. Until page 4:

        Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

of the mouldering flowers:

       Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; 

Before reading the book, I had been out preparing the garden for the ensuing heatwave. An enormous sunflower had opened up, the biggest I have ever seen. Then it began to droop.

I added a longer stake to keep the flower upright. But after I put the stake in, I realised that the flower was not drooping for lack of water or support. It was solid, bent over in the position shown in the photograph above.

A few hours later I read page 4 of Tennyson's Song. And in it was all the beauty and reason of my broad sunflower in its present condition. A work of God. 

My Damascene moment instantly converted me to Tennyson. Once again, my own bullshit had been called and I was wrong. 

The rest of the works are an absolute delight, and I made an interesting discovery. Tennyson used the phrase "a handful of dust" (p. 48). Evelyn Waugh had borrowed the phrase as the title for his novel, from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Waste Land is what got me into poetry in the first place, so the miracle of life continues, the circle of literary learning turns, and I live and learn.

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On Love: Turgenev Style

The statue of Mumu in front of her eponymous café in St. Petersburg. Photo by Grant Schutz [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia.

First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is something about Turgenev's work that distinguishes him from other famous Russian authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. His tone is masculine yet romantic in a forlorn way - maybe he had his unrequited love, married opera singer Pauline Viardot, in mind. It seems to convey a darker, Russian version of saudade. 

Hemingway said that for him, writing fiction was like boxing with Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal. There are certainly some similarities in Hemingway's work.

I am just getting in to War and Peace and I would compare Tolstoy to Virginia Woolf. That's how different the two famous Russian authors convey their stories. Both great authors, but very different in style.

I enjoyed Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album (A Sportsman's Sketches), but I only knew of this book because Hemingway mentioned it in one of his non-fiction collections I have read.

First Love and other stories is very different from either Sketches or Fathers and Sons. I have  not read Torrents of Spring yet. (Hemingway's first novella had the same name.)  I discovered this book because either Harold Bloom or Italo Calvino (I cannot remember which one) said that 'King Lear of the Steppes' was one of the greatest short stories (or is it long-form?) of all time.

Each of the stories are brilliant. Each has a sense of gloom about them. Not in the annoying way, but in that untranslatable saudade way. Not gloom, but so close to life. Something akin to that feeling that you have when you remember a past hurt.

You wouldn't go back to it - indeed, you had forgotten all about it until one day it just appears in front of you while you are watering the garden or doing the laundry. But there it is, and you feel sad for a moment, and then laugh, and then move on. 

But you remember the hurt, it just doesn't hurt so much anymore. (Unless of course you are on a complete downer, so don't do that.)

There is something about Turgenev that makes his long-form hard to read. I didn't find this with Fathers and Sons so much, but I found the same thing with Sketches. When I reflect on the stories, every one of them was enjoyable, but all of them require a bit of effort.

I don't know how to explain that effort, but I had the same experience with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. When I look at the book now, it is tiny, but it took a while to get through, even though I thought it was brilliant and I have since watched the movie starring Dirk Bogarde a few times. This then sent me off to read Bogarde's work (which I find easy and enjoyable to read).

Turgenev requires effort. In the way that going for a run requires effort. Once you have the miles in your legs, it is splendid. If you haven't run for years, it is almost impossible. I find that Turgenev requires a clear head and a commitment to read, but it is worth every effort.

Just don't turn to Turgenev when you are looking for a light read. It's a bit like going for a sprint when you haven't run for years. Same difference.