Letters of Ted Hughes

I haven't read much biography - probably fewer than ten volumes in my life. It doesn't appeal to me that much, for no clear reason, other than a lot of my reading is driven by the urge to stimulate my imagination - which is why SF and Fantasy figure strongly on my shelves. The biographies I have read are mainly of figures who have made a significant impression on me and left me with an urge to find out more about them as a person. Doing so hasn't been a waste of time so maybe I should read more?

Volumes of letters figure even less in my reading - in fact, this is only the second such volume I've read. The reasons for this are that I fear they may be dull and that on top of my not very rational avoidance of biographical material I feel that reading them is an invasion of privacy. I can't entirely overcome this feeling even though the letter-writer is generally dead when the letters are published and any living recipients must have given permission. The first volume were letters by Feynman. Now Hughes. These two are the great representative figures of the two major poles of my intellectual life, the scientific and the literary. Feynman was a great scientist and teacher of science - we would do well to attempt to be more like him, professionally. Hughes is someone writers should aspire to be more like; not by copying his style or themes but by ignoring everybody else and writing the way that is truest to themselves and their subjects. Both groups face significant institutionalised obstacles to acheiving these aims. So, to overcome my negative feelings about reading private letters it seems that the writer must be on the top tier of my personal pantheon of Great Figures.

Moving on to the book, at last: I was primarily motivated by the idea of gaining insight into Hughes' writing, particularly the poetry. I certainly got that, but I got many other things besides. As examples, an insight into the literary life of poets (bitter, sometimes public rivalry and resentment, deep friendships) a good look at Hughes' character (difficult at times, superstitious) and life (bleakly over-shadowed by tragedy). Some of the letters made me feel very uncomfortably voyeuristic, particularly Hughes' love letters to Sylvia Plath. Only a few were written for the public (letters to newspapers).

The insights into Hughes' writing come as two types; biographical and discursive. An crucial example of the former was learning that Hughes gave up studying English and persued Archaeology and Anthropology for his final year in Cambridge. This, coupled with learning that almost everything Hughes read as a child/teen was folklore or myth and that he was heavily influenced by reading Jung, explains the imagination and world-view that brought Crow, Cave-birds and even the Lauriette poems into being.

As to the discursive in letters to friends and students, Hughes explains at length the origins (often dreams) and symbolism of his work. It turns out that almost all his poetry is symbolic of something or other - frequently mythic figures. It's also clear that next to nobody would be likely to figure out these symbols without help, even when they have a good grounding in the world literature of myth and folklore. For instance, the Hawk in Hawk Roosting represents an ancient Egyptian god. This is indicated by the line, "The sun is behind me." We all picked up on that, didn't we? The giant pike that rises at the end of Pike is also symbolic. Really, if it could possibly be symbolic, even in the most apparently straight-foward poems, then it almost certainly was - and if it is barely conceivable that something could be symbolic, then it probably was, too. Then there are the overtly symbolic poems...

There is so much to learn from these letters that I was itching to read from my Collected Poems alongside this volume - but unable to do so - all my poetry is in a warehouse. I also wanted to get and read everything Hughes wrote and re-read everything I'd already read. I could so easily have veered into amateur Hughes student territory, too; I wanted to read all the published criticism of his work and also felt even more neglectful in not knowing Sylvia Plath's work at all. Plath is inescapable in this book; she haunts it, just as she haunted Hughes' life until the publication of Birthday Letters when Hughes was already terminally ill with cancer.

Anybody who wants to understand Hughes or his work needs to read this book.