Dr Steve Ely, senior lecturer in inventive writing at The University of Huddersfield, discusses their analysis on the work of the poet Ted Hughes.
Ted Hughes by Fay Godwin © British Library Board
In 2022 I used to be awarded an AHRC grant to finish a two-year programme of analysis entitled Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity. The analysis is designed to discover and expound the view that Hughes’s most distinctive, authentic and greatest work—the work that made his identify—is basically Expressionist, characterised by a visionary subjectivity that transforms content material in an effort to current his personal distinctive view of the world. Although his work is sort of all the time rooted in remark, most clearly so in poems that take animals and nature as their ostensible content material, Hughes isn’t content material with limiting himself to realist or naturalistic representations. Imagination, argument and didactic intent mix in his work to create symbols and metaphors that articulate his personal apocalyptic truths. Beyond this, an vital secondary goal of the analysis is to make use of Expressionism to know Hughes within the context of twentieth century actions and tendencies within the arts typically, not merely in ‘English Literature’, thereby facilitating a broader and extra nuanced understanding of the achievement and standing of an artist nonetheless too usually understood as a ‘maverick’.
Expressionism is an elusive and contested time period, and never one usually utilized in Hughes research, or certainly, in English Literature, and a part of my analysis—and the work of the symposium—will likely be to discover, expound and critique its that means on this context. An thrilling vary of talks—Hughes and German Expressionist cinema, Hughes and Alchemy, Hughes and ‘absolute music’, a lot of shows on Hughes’s relationships and affinities with different artists and writers together with Peter Brooke, Barrie Cooke, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Alan Moore, Janos Pilinsky, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, and a number of other analyses of key works, together with Seneca’s Oedipus, Crow, Gaudete, Capriccio and ‘Mayday on Holderness’, ‘The Howling of Wolves’ and ‘Anniversary’—will break new floor in doing so. Of course, lots of the talks draw extensively on analysis performed within the British Library’s wealthy and endlessly rewarding Ted Hughes archive.
I’m a poet with a dozen or so publications below my belt, together with Englaland (2015), Lectio Violant (2021) and The European Eel (2021). However, a lifelong curiosity in Hughes led to a parallel profession as an English literature educational, as Director of the Ted Hughes Network at Huddersfield University, the place I additionally educate Creative Writing. These two strands got here collectively to tell this analysis. Initially, an curiosity in creating a greater understanding of my very own processes and strategies of creative creation led me to discover and develop into extra self-conscious about my very own writing in a cross-disciplinary context. This led to the realisation that the applying of the same method would possibly present a fruitful methodology of interrogating and understanding Hughes’s encyclopedic oeuvre, to achieve a way of the place—in all that variety and richness—his essential achievement lies.
An vital step on the journey to Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity was the publication in 2020 of James Keery’s Apocalypse!, a revisionist anthology of the uncared for and maligned poetry of the Nineteen Forties, its predecessors and antecedents, in doing so demonstrating the ‘visionary modernist’ context which offered the matrix for Hughes’s emergence—and to some extent ‘explains’ his singularity within the Movement-dominated English poetry scene of the mid/late Twentieth century. In 2022 Professor John Goodby and I organised twin symposia—Apocalypse I and Apocalypse II, at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Huddersfield respectively—impressed by Keery’s work and insights. Apocalypse’ (guide and symposia) helped catalyse my pondering and led to the AHRC software and my present analysis.
Indeed, because the analysis has developed, apocalypse is more and more changing into an vital idea in serving to me to articulate my understanding of Ted Hughes’s Expressionism. There’s a two-fold sense to this. In the Greek, ‘apocalypse’ means a revealing, unveiling or imaginative and prescient—an interior expertise triggering an pressing, extremely subjective response. Of course, ‘vision’ is a key side of Expressionism. However, via the content material and notoriety of the Apocalypse of S. John the Divine (the Book of Revelation in most Protestant Bibles), a second understanding of apocalypse—catastrophe, disaster, the tip of the world—has develop into dominant. Much of Hughes’s poetry is anxious to deal with and articulate apocalypse on this sense, not solely in his eco-poetry and his tackle to the atrocity and battle that characterises the trendy world, but in addition in his work addressed to ontology and being, his sense that people are catastrophically cut-off from the spontaneity of their pure lives and are thus not solely unable to stay in concord with themselves, their friends and the pure world, however are consequently locked into disastrous cycles of alienation, violence and self-harm. I’ve spent lots of time making an attempt to give you a basic definition of Expressionism to tell my analysis. However, I’m more and more pondering that ‘apocalypse’ may be key: visionary work, rooted in a singular world view, articulated through creativeness and addressed to pressing themes, as a lot of Hughes’s work is, is sort of sure to supply Expressionist work.
Material from the Ted Hughes Archive
Ted Hughes Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity will happen within the Pigott Theatre, Knowledge Centre, British Library on 15th September, 2023. Attendance is FREE to members of the general public, however Eventbrite reserving is required. More particulars, the symposium programme and the reserving hyperlink might be discovered right here: https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/tedhughes/expressionism/symposium/.