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We are delighted to announce that the British Library will host a symposium on Ted Hughes and Expressionism in collaboration with Dr Steve Ely, Director of the Ted Hughes Network on the University of Huddersfield.
Ted Hughes by Fay Godwin © British Library Board
This symposium is designed to discover and examine the declare that Hughes’s most attribute, distinctive, and progressive work—whereby lies the burden of his declare to be considered a serious poet and an internationally important artist—is basically Expressionist, characterised by a rejection of objectivity in illustration in favour of a Visionary Subjectivity that pulls on interior life and creativeness to rework and deform content material, deploying abstraction, typologies and symbols to form shows in an primarily didactic method.
Hughes’s Expressionist mode manifests all through his oeuvre and contains a lot of his most celebrated poems and books, together with ‘Wind’, ‘Mayday on Holderness’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘Pike’, Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, Gaudete, Remains of Elmet and Capriccio. Many of his performs and quick tales—’Difficulties of a Bridegroom’, ‘The Wound’, ‘The Head’—are equally Expressionist, having explicit affinities with German Expressionism. Of course, not all Hughes’s work is Expressionist by any means, and throughout his profession he produced celebrated poetry that appears to signify a extra goal—Naturalist, Realist—response to expertise, in works together with Season Songs, Moortown Diaries, River and Birthday Letters, for instance.
Focusing on Hughes’s artwork, methodology and method on this means invitations approaches to his work that transcend the Anglophone literary-historical custom and focus on his work within the context of European and worldwide artists and actions within the arts—visible, dramatic and musical in addition to literary— affinity, affect and collaboration: one thinks instantly of Hughes’s work with, and advocacy of, progressive, experimental and avant-garde artists within the Expressionist custom, together with the Eastern European poets Herbert, Holub, Pilinsky and Popa; the American artist Leonard Baskin; the dramatist, director and impresario Peter Brook and the photographer Fay Godwin.
The British Library is a serious centre for Hughes examine with substantial collections referring to the poet that embody archival, printed and audio-visual materials. Researchers can study extra about all elements of Hughes’ work by exploring his giant private archive (Add MS 88918), which was acquired in 2008 and numerous smaller associated collections together with Hughes’ correspondence with Olwyn Hughes, Leonard Baskin and Keith Sagar. Please see the Library’s assortment information on Hughes for extra details about its Hughes holdings.
Material from the Ted Hughes Archive
Subjects for papers would possibly embody, however are not at all restricted to, the next. Proposals ought to make the hyperlink to the themes of the symposium clear.
- Works by Hughes: particular poems, sequences or collections; radio performs; quick tales; essential prose or pedagogical works
- Hughes’s poetics: artifice, methodology, type, method
- Hughes and ‘visionary precursors’ (together with, however not restricted to, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats)
- Hughes, T.S. Eliot and Modernism
- Hughes, Dylan Thomas & the poets of the New Apocalypse
- Hughes’s relationship with fashionable and modern experimental and avant-garde English language poetry
- Hughes, European and International poetry & poets
- Hughes and visible artists (together with, however not restricted to, related collaborations, for instance, with Leonard Baskin and Fay Godwin)
- Hughes and Drama
- Hughes’s work with Peter Brook
- Hughes and German Expressionism
- Hughes and Music
Please ship proposals of as much as 250 phrases for 20-minute papers, plus a brief biographical observe, to Steve Ely at s.ely@hud.ac.uk by Friday, 12th May, 2023. There will likely be no cost for registration.
For extra details about the Ted Hughes Network, see: https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/tedhughes/.