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The Howling Of Wolves

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on April 25, 2010

Poem of the day. I’ve already mentioned Hughes, but I came across this piece again flicking through his collected poems looking for Moortown Diary, the poems he wrote whilst running a farm in Devon. Many of Hughes’ poems are incidental, notational, and have that live, red glow of a metal forged just instants ago on the anvil of the present moment. (Not to be confused with Yeats’ anvil, where all the metals were cold-worked over many weeks, even months.) Hughes believed that a poem had to be written in one sitting, as a single, coherent discharge of energies not necessarily your own. Hughes always tried to breach the suprapersonal. He believed in the validity of Shamanism. What rescues his instantaneous poetics from becoming transient news and throwaway rubbish is his relationship to language, his acute, telepathic connection to it’s powers of description and calling into being, and his sense of the fundamental: mythic maps and archetypes underlying personal and surface experience. He trusted the darkness, because he trusted his senses, and the clairvoyance of language. There is a long tradition in the West of the blind seer, the blind poet. The greatest Greek seer was Tiresias, blind. The greatest Greek poet was Homer, blind. Hughes is not seduced by his own individuality, he recognises that the self, the ego, is a false lense, and he often deliberately tries to blind himself in search of a greater, less ego and species-centric vision. His initial aim, to capture animals in his poems, as he had once captured animals in his boyhood in Yorkshire, deepened and broadened into an environmental concern for the welfare of whole ecologies. And there is a sense that each of his poems, as incidental and immediate as they are, are conceived within a poetic ecology. He learned from Vasko Popa, and Yeats, never to ignore the whole body of your work when writing an individual piece. So, each flash-bulb poem is actually part of a greater collage, and has a deeper level of coordination. I know I’ve mentioned Sylvia Plath as a poet of the immediate, and she did try to sustain themes across multiple poems, but her coordination operated at a subjective, neurotic level. Her struggle with depression was intense. If she had survived, if she’d lived past the Ariel poems written in ’62 and ’63, she would have matured and deepened: she had come into possession of a style and language that was fantastically alive and open to psychological nuance. Maybe she could have went on to use that fictionally, rather than relentlessly autobiographically? Who knows. The poem I came across while flicking for the Moortown poems was one that Hughes wrote in the months following Plath’s death. He wrote that he used to lie awake at night, within earshot of London Zoo, listening to the wolves howl. The poem is a lament for Plath, written at that time of night when the emptiness is at it’s most threatening. That there are forces greater than us and operating without concern for us, is without doubt. That the wolves are representative of Plath herself, is probable.

The howling of wolves

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Turning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing
And slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly
It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

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From the Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on April 16, 2010

dawid_sierakowiak-200x300

April 16, 1941. Lodz. On Wednesday an announcement was posted for the voluntary registration of men, eighteen to forty five, and women, twenty to thirty, for labour in Germany. On Saturday, all those who ever registered for labour but have not yet left began receiving notifications to report immediately for departure. Several thousand persons have left. They are probably lucky buggers with better chances of surviving the war than we in the ghetto. All the letters that arrive from those sent out for labour assure us about satiety there (“We can eat, eat, and eat again”), something that’s no longer experienced in the ghetto.

Footnote: The Nazis regularly claimed that deportations from the ghetto were to provide labour for camps in Germany and elsewhere. In most cases, the actual destination was Chelmno, in Poland’s Kolo County, where the deportees from Lodz were held in a small church in town, and then driven in vans that asphyxiated them on the way to a field in a nearby forest where the bodies were dumped and burned. The Nazis sought to avoid future resistance by compelling some deportees to write fictitious letters and postcards back to the ghetto before putting the Jews to death – a fate that many by then had realised they would be facing, if only by reading the words that others had scratched into the woodwork and altar of the church.

(from Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, editted by Alan Adelson, translated by Kamil Turowski. Bloomsbury 1996)

I read Dawid Sierakowiaks diary regularly, and I’ll post something more extensive on his story later. But the reason I pasted today’s entry for 1941 is, two nights ago my ten year old asked me two questions: how do you split an atom? And, what is evil? It’s an interesting conjunction of questions out of which you could probably spin a dissertation on the status of, and belief in, reason, as an objective force in the world to which we should ally ourselves in the defence against evil. When I was my son’s age I had an uncritical assumption that evil is something radical and an entity in itself. But reading certain studies of those involved in perpetatrating evil has changed that opinion: Hannah Arendt’s study of Eichman, Robert Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and Gitta Sereny’s interviews with the former camp Kommandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl. None of these evildoers were out of the ordinary. So the issue of how to explain the nature of evil is more complex and embedded in the misuse of one’s faculties of critical reflection and what an Existentialist might call Bad Faith, acts of ommision where one is in a position to act positively in a direction demanded by what it is right to do. I need to find a way not simply of explaining this to him, but also of illustrating the disturbing tendency of man to act as a herd animal who perceives truth as something decided by majority decision. According to Robert Browning, less than 10% of the middle aged police reservists who were sent to Poland to execute Jews in the wake of the Army’s push towards Russia opted out of commiting mass murder, even though there was little threat of punishment if they did choose to opt out. Awww, bless them: they just wanted to belong…

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Sailing To Byzantium, Yeats

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on March 24, 2010

 

Pome of the day. W.B. Yeats. ‘Silly Willy’, as Maude Gonne, Yeats’ great unrequited love, called him. He was born in 1865 and died in 1939. He started off as a Pre-Raphaelite Nationalist and finished as an apocolyptic visionary nationalist. The difference between the two positions lies in his relationship to poetic form and the idea of mastery. Yeats is often referred to as a Master. He often referred to certain other artists as Masters. And the idea of Mastery is one that crops up frequently in his middle to late poetry. The notion is one that Yeats adopted and developed in reaction to Romantic ideals of poetic inspiration prevalent in the 19th Century. Wordsworth, for example, but no less Shelley and Coleridge, had a model of inspired dictation where the poem arrived gift-like from an outer or inner darkness. The trick was to cultivate a special kind of inward audition and anticipatory attentiveness, ready to transcribe what was heard. Now, that makes the Romantics sound awfully passive, and I’m sure there was much more practical artisanship and lapidary struggle with language and form than the ideal recognises. But Yeats consciously reacted against the ideal: especially as he aged, he refused to give ground or to lose vigour (infamously, he underwent a monkey-gland transplant procedure in an attempt to ward off the effects of ageing). He held up the notion of Mastery in direct opposition to the Romantic model. In most of Yeats’ poems there is a sense of deliberation that (usually) transcends awkwardness. There is always the sense that a struggle has been undergone and that the eventual poem has been hammered out, as on an anvil. He admired architects and sculptors, the way they overcame the stubborn, innate intractability of their material and achieved a form that dominated the environment. When he pulls it off, his poetry has a corresponding authority. The voice is not particularly nuanced, nor does it register psychological subtlety: his goal was impersonal formal presence and the assertion of symbols with radiant power. He is wonderfully irrational at times, in the sense that he refuses to be measured or belittled by the constraints of reason. Like Dostoyevsky, he refused to be stopped by a wall simply because it is a wall. He dismisses the fact, contemptuosly. You can, of course, easily argue against this position, but when you read the poetry such an objection seems to miss the point, and is a symptom of your own lack of imagination and shaping power. I don’t agree with his politics, and some go so far as to detect an incipient fascism in his stance, but his poetry refuses, magnificently, to back down. Even death withers under his gaze. Sometimes. An interesting question is whether poetry of this order is still possible, or does Yeats represent the last fling of the Western imagination confident in it’s transcendant sources of authority? Modern American poetry, for example, rarely indulges in the formal confidence of the Yeatsian stanza. Instead, it is characterised by ‘open’ forms that are incomplete. The greatest 20th Century American admirer of Yeats was John Berryman, who said he wanted to be Yeats. He wasn’t, he was a brilliant alcoholic genius who took one of Yeats’ favourite stanza forms, the six lined unit, and ‘subjectivised’ it by introducing enjambment and sub-clausal constructions and revisions. He was haunted by contingency and a lack of certitude, and reflected that in his famous Dream Songs. He makes a fascinating contrast to Yeats. I’ve chosen Sailing to Byzantium. It is dense and deliberate, but pitched slightly lower than his most unconditional assertions. It’s noteworthy that despite the artifice, he remains trapped within the dimension of time.

[Sailing to Byzantium]

 

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I’ve been listening to Sociology…

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on March 21, 2010

I had another one of those ‘what!?’ moments driving home the other night. The kind that slaps you in the face when you encounter a worldview self-consistent and very different to your own. I was listening to a series of lectures on Sociological theories with special emphasis on explaining the nature of Deviance, what it is, where it’s sources are, it’s function, and it’s relation to morality and wider society. The Professor, an American academic, came to the final lecture and casually announced that as of 1996, the year these lectures were being given, the status of Sociology as a science was being challenged. Fair enough, I never really thought it was a science anyway, it’s practitioners would like to don that mantle and benefit from the prestige that accompanies Science, but it’s not really like Chemistry or Physics, is it? Nope, it’s just a bunch of academics pointing out the obvious, the best of them Novelists who missed their true calling. But the Professor agreed with this, and talked about a ‘new’ way of seeing the world that had originated in France, and which was in origin a literary theory, not a scientific one. He said that Sociology was like the interpretation of texts. Objective reality is a tenuous concept in Sociology: you don’t measure the attitudes and beliefs of a society against a yardstick outwith it, because Sociological reality is these attitudes and beliefs. The movement in literary criticism that had recently arisen in France, he said, similarly denied any objective criteria outwith the text itself by which to judge it. By this he meant that you cannot use the authors intentions to judge the success or failure of a work, nor can you reach through the text to the author, him or herself. Texts do not necessarily refer to anything outside themselves. Now, this is both liberating, and at the same time castrating, solipsistic, debilitating and enervating. This is basically a manifesto for wankers. The establising of objective aesthetic criteria and standards is notoriously difficult, if not impossible: pick any measure, and you can cite counter examples to refute it. Pick metaphorical complexity, retort with Homer. Choose simplicity, and argue against that with Shakespeare. Choose universality, and discuss the case of Racine, infamous for being particular to the French, yet acknowledged as great by all who are at home in the French language. Maybe aesthetic excellence is a constellation of factors, not one constellation, but plural possibilities. Maybe it’s like a flowchart! If not A, then B. If B, then C or D…etc. It starts to get messy. But that’s not really the point: what shocked me most was the deletion of the author, and the assertion that we cannot ascertain the author’s intentions or make meaningful contact with the author through the work. As anyone who has had a favourite author will know, reading their work intensively will leave you with a sense of their presence, an almost intimate relationship. This is especially true of poetry, where even ‘impersonal’ writers like Eliot and Milosz leave you with a sense of their selves. What I think is really going on here is a process the Professor detailed in an earlier lecture, where he talked about the origins of ‘Child Abuse’ as a diagnostic and socially ‘deviant’ category. A sociologists (whose name escapes me for the moment) became interested in the modern phenomenon of Child Abuse: as it is portrayed in the media, as it is dealt with by various agencies, as to the stereotypes and responses it evokes in us. He wrote that Child Abuse as we know it is a recent construct. Sure, children were abused in the past, but the modern diagnosis and response was traceable to a specific professional group: Research Radiographers. Apparently, the prevalence and incidence of modern child abuse was first highlighted and mapped by a group of research Radiographers. The Sociologist asked why it was not first highlighted by Paediatricians. His answer was twofold: first of all, Paediatrics is perhaps the one medical speciality where the client and the patient are different. The client is the responsible paying adult, father or mother, the patient is the child. Inherently there is a conflict of interest. Radiology at the time was a diagnostic sub speciality with no treatments ring-fenced to itself. In the era prior to radiation therapy for cancer, Radiology was simply an imageing service and low on the medical heirarchy. The Sociologist who studied the origins of Child Abuse argued that it was a means to gaining professional prestige that was in part the driving factor behind the research Radiologists’ highlighting and framing the incidence of injured and neglected children as a category called Child Abuse. A category they would be crucially involved in diagnosing. Same thing with literary theory that assassinates the author and then says that the text was simply a ‘pre-text’ for the interpretative readings which attend upon it, and which in strong versions of the theory actually lend flesh to its meaning: without these academic theorists reading the text, the text would have no meaning! You know what? Get out the toilet, and write your own bloody book! Sorry. My other objection is the further removal of literature and art (in general) from moral consideration. The relationship between the moral and the aesthetic is a battleground. Does truly great art of necessity have a moral dimension? Is art amoral? Most artists would say that it is amoral. They would deny the constraints placed upon art by morality, and claim total freedom of expression. But is this a Western luxury? Many East European poets, including two of the greatest 20th Century poets, Milosz and Herbert, do not deny the moral dimension of their poetry. There is throughout their poetry an emphasis on truth-telling that incorporates the obligation to draw a moral line in the sand against Orwellian forces that would have you believe that truth, including morality, is a sociological thing, and entirely in the power of the powers that dominate society, or that educate society in and through it’s universities, and it’s other organs of influence. I suppose it comes down to a last analysis of whether or not you believe that ‘truth’ can be anchored in an objective reality, and specifically, moral truth, or is it a construct of society and it’s dominant ruling interest group? And if truth is that relative, then what about the art that purports to make reference to it? It’s enough to make you scurry back to Homer and Shakespeare.

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September 1, 1939. Auden

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on March 16, 2010


Pome of the day. Auden. W. H. Auden is an English poet, born in 1907, and died in 1973. (I find it difficult to talk about poets in the past tense). He is probably the greatest 20th Century English poet, Ted Hughes notwithstanding. Auden was immensely erudite, and in his reading habits formed highly intense relationships with thinkers like Freud and Kierkegaard. His intelligence was aquisitive and not misdirected by morbid drives to self-expression, but applied to a wider understanding of society and his place within it, both as a poet and as a citizen. This civic sense lends authority to his poetry and is not an affectation, but an inheritance: he was robustly middle-class, the son of an eminent medical doctor whose chosen field was public health. He attended boarding school before reading English at Oxford. His reading encompassed the Classics, Greek and Roman, but also Icelandic literature. His fascination with Icelandic literature also helps explain one of the sources of his authority, its similarities with Old English showing an influence on his earlier poetry. In common with Hughes, who he is otherwise very different from, Auden had a sense of the English language as an incipient thing, a sense of its Germanic wellsprings. The topic of Auden’s relationship with the English language is a fascinating one, and his example stands almost as a rebuke to Daemonic theories of poetic inspiration that invoke a dark underside as their source of authority. Heidegger, the German thinker, said that man (and woman, of course) speaks only insofar as he (or she) concurs with the greater energies of Language itself. Language has an independent existence, its own economy. It cannot exist without us but can exist far beyond us. If we connect with it properly, our resources are greatly expanded. Shakespeare, for example, connected with the English language at some fundamental level, hence his greatness. Auden’s authority, also, seems at times to come from a supra-personal source. It is the authority of the language itself. Add to this an additional feature that most great poets seem to possess: an ability to distil a simple, resonant template out of the flux of experience and language. Most great poets are simultaneously simple and complex. The easiest example that I’ve so far quoted is Pilinsky’s ‘Fable’. A childlike folktale that has numerous complex resonances. Great scientists also possess this ability to discern simple laws in the midst of complex phenomena. Auden’s authority stems from this clear sightedness, which seems to expand under extended consideration. In his longer pieces, this effect is further supplemented by the spectacle of a great intelligence fully immersed in the 20th century and trying to engage its deepest issues. If you want ‘news’, in the sense of what is really important and what counts, go to a great poet. What to choose from his poetry? He was a technically accomplished and innovative sonnet writer, combining novelistic elements with Old English flourishes of gnomic wisdom and at his cumulative best in that form in sequences such as ‘In Time Of War’. His poems tend to be long, so I’ll take the time to type in a famous one, written just after Germany invaded Poland, and hence started World War 2.
(September 1, 1939)

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Miroslav Holub

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on March 10, 2010

Miroslav Holub

Miroslav Holub. Holub is a Czechloslavakian poet, born in 1923. He died in 1998. He was an important scientist as well as a great poet. His field was immunology. His science informs his poetry on many levels. He has a characteristic maneouvre of ‘breaking down’ an object or situation into more complex parts. In science this is often referred to, sometimes pejoratively, as reductionism. With the simple but crucial difference that, in science, the parts are simpler than the whole. Holub subverts this. Consequently,  when Holub engages in this procedure it usually becomes surrealist and strange, the ‘parts’ animated by goals and agendas different from the whole. There is a famous essay of his on the death of a Muskrat, called ‘Shedding Life’. In it, he describes a Muskrat’s death, but on many different levels: at the immunological, hormonal, intracellular, etc. He observes that, even as the Muskrat lies cooling, components of it’s immune system are mounting a chemical defence on it’s behalf against the concrete it has been smashed onto. He mixes grotesque and disturbing but factual observation from science with Greek myth and episodes from history. Sometimes the former are radically at odds with the general meaning of the latter, the precision of scientific observation dissolves the bigger picture into a collection of little facts. He is not, however, nihilistic or pessimistic about the human endeavour. Science is, after all, a human invention and discipline. But Holub also nods towards another order of truth that he cannot fully relinquish while continuing to be a poet. Holub sometimes brings these two truths together, and simply lays them side by side, making no attempt to reconcile them. I don’t think they can be reconciled, ultimately. There’s a famous admission made by George Steiner (of all people), that you cannot ‘prove’ the greatness of Shakespeare. It’s not like mathematics or a problem in physics, where truth can be demonstrated by objective procedures. Wittgenstein and Tolstoy, for example, were both dissidents from Shakespeare. And Steiner could not think of any thing or way that would prove them wrong. Holub toys with the truths of science in a subversive way, often with political overtones, but still writes like the great poet he is.

(Zito the Magician)

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Tomas Transtromer

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on March 4, 2010


Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is a Swedish poet, born in 1931. By profession, he is a Psychologist. His profession tinges his poetry only slightly, as he largely avoids using any psychological terminology or any of its concepts and categories. He is, however, interested in dreams, boundaries, and the transition from one state to another. Twilight, dawn, shifts in the weather, the threshold between inner and outer, sleep and waking, wellness and Illness, houses and sky, all feature in his poetry, but not in a psychoanalytic way. Poetry is more precise than psychology. Apparently, his poems carry over well in translation. There is a visual clarity in his poetry, an unpressured use of language characteristic of a moderate man. His poems are not driven, either by outside terrors, political or otherwise, or by inner demons and neuroses. But he is open to the occasional quiet epiphany. Good man. We all need the door to swing open slightly now and then in our lives. The poem I’ve chosen is an experience I can relate to, as the same weird panic happened once to me on waking. But I was a teenager then, and doing drugs a lot more exotic than just this legal alcohol crap I’ve been reduced to now. Oh, and the other reason I like this is that it is such a psychological conception of the utmost Hell. Traditional theology links the state of Hell to a knowledge of the Self as a thing separate from God. That is precisely the burden of knowledge, the loss of innocence, what happens to you when you eat a Kerr’s Pink offered by some woman in league with the serpent. Utmost Hell is to be damned, and then to lose the one thing you clinged onto in your damnation: your Self. Whoa.. maybe this dude really is a psychologist! Or a psychotheologist! WTF? God, how did you and your dad get on? That was a whole different creation, dude. Not relevant.
[The Name]

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Why The Classics, Zbigniew Herbert

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on February 28, 2010

Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert is….another Polish poet! The 20th Century is not Eliot’s, nor is it Auden’s, or Lowell’s, all three of whom made an immense intellectual effort to traverse and map our most violent and innovative century yet. In some sense they were not really at ground zero. They were historians, with the connotation that term has of distance and overview, of peripheral safety. Or maybe sometimes journalists, in a moderate democracy… The Poles, however, live in a country more ravaged and fought over back and forwards than any other, perhaps, at least in ‘the West’. Like Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert bears witness. His poetry has a moral function. We in ‘the West’ have an aversion to attributing any function to art, other than to shock, amuse, offer oblique commentary and generate money. But Zbigniew Herbert uses his poetry almost like a mass spectrometer, to break down and to analyse, to help make sense of his situation. He rejects the lyrical ego, that subjective ‘I’ that sits at the generative centre of so much western poetry, and which rests it’s truth telling function on notions of a subconscious that somehow equates to a deeper reality. He is different from Eliot, Auden and Lowell in his relationship to history and the literature of the past in that he is not a creator of worlds ransacking these disciplines for material. Instead, his outward perspective is a matter of survival, and his poems are the by-products of an ongoing need to make sense of his environment. To this end he has a character, Mr Cogito, an Alter Ego, who he deploys as a cartoon thinker. Like Descartes, he often starts from first principles, or none at all: this allows Mr Cogito access to the history and culture of European civilisation, without being tramelled by it, so his investigations are ideologically free. This makes his bafflements, and conclusions, or findings, eminently sane. Having said that, however, I am not going to select from the Cogito poems, but instead choose a poem famous as a statement of self-abnegating responsibility, a rebuke to romantic posturing.

[Why The Classics]

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Compass, Borges

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on February 26, 2010

Compass. Jorge Luis Borges. I knew Borges as a short story writer before I discovered he wrote poetry also. His short stories are excersises in applied metaphysics: he often starts with an idea, an abstract one dealing with tenous entities or concepts, such as time, eternity, infinity, alternate grammars and philosophies, paradoxes and universal symbols. And then with almost mathematical rigour delineates a concrete world where these ideas and concepts exert a shaping power almost akin to fate. As if fate wore many masks, and was given over to playing games. His most famous short story is perhaps Tlon, Uqbar, Obis Tertius, which tells of an enormous enterprise undertaken by a secret society of scientists, philosophers, engineers, theologians, linguists, etc, to write a multi volume encyclopaedia of an imaginary planet, detailing its history, its peoples, differing cultures, languages, plants, animals, religions…The encyclopaedia is released gradually, and its seduction is such that its contents soon come to supplant reality itself, which is remade in the image of the encyclopaedia. Borges is fond of the conceit that reality is somewhere written. In a library we may not have access to, or which may be the universe itself in an unintelligble language. Unintelligible…to us. His poetry is likewise preoccupied with the ramifications of ideas, and I think he is at his best in a form which matched and answered to his need for precision: the sonnet. Artifacts and the figures of various craftsmen appear regularly in his poems, as if he himself acknowledged an affinity with these in his own poetic procedures. He’s like a watchmaker, but it is not simply time he wishes to record, but riddles, labyrinths, mirrors, days and eternity, the mystery of being. These are all intellectual puzzles that he tries to engineer into these marvellous devices in an attempt to observe their inner workings, perhaps to break their code. Very often, however, his sonnets end by indicating something beyond themselves, something supra-rational. It is a maneouvre that abdicates to a greater mystery, and one that he made more frequently with advancing years. I don’t think he would have agreed with Bertrand Russell, who asserted that the world is simply ‘brute fact’. Like Milosz, he craved a day of comprehension.
(Compass)

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And Owl, Foxhunt, Ted Hughes

Posted by Eckhart's Dog Woof! Woof! on February 23, 2010

tedhughes

Ted Hughes is responsible for introducing many of the major east European poets to a British audience via the journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, which he editted alongside Daniel Weissbort. Hughes translated many of these poets himself, with assistance from someone fluent in the original language. And in the process was exposed to trends outwith the Anglo-American and the Modernist traditions. Hughes’ attitude towards ‘literature’, as an established canon, a semiotic game or code the rules of which need to be learned, is one of wary ambivalence. He attended Cambridge on a scholarship, initially to study English, but afterwards changing to the study of Amthropology, having been warned by his ‘muse’ in a dream that his academic studies in literature were killing the centres of his own creativity. As Hughes recounts it, he fell asleep at his desk over an essay on a topic in English literature when, in his dream, the door to his room swung open and a figure with the head of a fox entered, and left a bloody hand (not paw) print impressed on his essay. ‘Stop this – you are destroying us’, the figure intoned, before turning to leave. Hughes took the hint, and changed his studies to Anthropology and Archaeology. He did not like literary or academic poetry, or the likes of which have been nurtered in academic houthouses. He preferred a poetry that engaged more directly with life. He described Shakespeare’s language, for example, as an emergency construct assembled out of any and all sources at his, Shakespeare’s, disposal, in the face of a spiritual crisis. It was not merely stage entertainment. Likewise he found in that generation of East European poets marked by World War 2 a sense of crisis that stripped their poetry of the inessential, and rendered literary embellishment and ornamentation vividly inadequate. Intially, Hughes engaged the natural world directly, and there are good grounds for arguing that he is the greatest nature poet in the English Language. But he was carried far beyond this initial starting point when he encountered the likes of Pilinsky, Holan, Popa. His mature style takes lessons learned from these poets, and fuses them with more primordial sources drawn from his studies in Antropolgy. And underlying all of this is a deep engagement with Shakespeare and an almost Elizabethan sense of the English Language as something not yet entirely settled into it’s groove but pressured by the need to improvise at a moment’s notice. Having said all this, it might be worthwhile quoting two of his poems, the first, ‘And Owl’, showing influences from the Eastern Europeans, and Anthropological sources in mythology and folktale, and the second, ‘Foxhunt’, an example of that ‘immediacy testing’ that he often subjected language to, to see if it was equal to the task.

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