Ted Hughes
The verse ofTed Hughes(1930–1998) shows little of Larkin’s interest in human
beings, nor his horrified urbanity or suburbanity.The Hawk in the Rain contains
memorable poems about birds and fish, such as ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘Pike’, based on
boyhood experience of fishing and shooting in his native Yorkshire. He fills these
poems with the animals’ physical presence, endowing their natural strength with
mythic power. These taut muscular poems still seem his best. The anthropology he
read at Cambridge enabled him to systematize his approach in Crow, an invented
primitive creation cycle which glorifies a brutal life-force. He could not resist this
violent tendency, producing a truly repulsive version of Seneca’s Œdipus for Peter
Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty. The personality of certain writers affects their fame in
their lifetime. This certainly applies to Hughes, who had a commanding presence
and voice. His later work is quieter and more topographical. Hughes accepted the
Laureateship in succession to Betjeman, perhaps attracted to the mythic aspect of
the role, which he performed conscientiously. His life was darkened by the suicide in
1963 ofhis wife Sylvia Plath, the American poet. Her intense verse eventually took a
turn, as in her father-hating poem ‘Daddy’, which led some of her admirers to blame
Hughes for her death. Before he died in 1998, he released in Birthday Letters poems
which concern that time.
Geoffrey Hill
According to a poem by the Australian Peter Porter, ‘Great British poets begin with
H’. The least known but not the least of these is the remarkably gifted Geoffrey Hill
(1932–), a teacher in universities in England and the USA, elected Oxford Professor
of Poetry in 2011. He is concerned with the public responsibility of poetry towards
historical human suffering, injustice and martyrdom. His long-digested verse has
the tight verbal concentration, melody and intelligence of Eliot, Pound and early
Auden, adroitly using a variety of verse-forms and fictional modes. He is agonized,
intense, ironical, scornful and increasingly lyrical, about the landscapes of his
boyhood. Extreme condensation, ambiguity and allusiveness lend his work a daunt-
ing aspect, softened in his more narrative later sequences, which show an increasing
relaxation in style and in variety of content, and a far more explicitly prophetic role.
But he remains a poet’s poet.
His most approachable volume is Mercian Hymns, a sequence ofmemories of his
Worcestershire boyhood, figured in a series of Anglo-Saxon prose poems about Offa,
the 8th-century King of Mercia and England, poems both historical, fantastic and
humorous.Its serious play domesticates and makes intimate the ancient and
modern history of England. Hill’s future readership is the unknown question of
current English literary history.
Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison(1937–), on the other hand,has been a public poet, writing a very
regular pentameter line with punchy rhymes. He took his old-fashioned ideas of
verse, and of communicativeness, from his classical education. Harrison was a clas-
sical scholar, but he says that he learned from stand-up comics in Leeds about pace,
timing and delivery. He is a professional performer who knows how to reach his
POETRY 397Ted Hughes(1930–1998)
A selection: The Hawk in the
Rain(1957), Lupercal
(1960), Wodwo(1967), Crow
(1970), Birthday Letters
(1999).Sir Geoffrey Hill(1932–)
For the Unfallen(1959), King
Log(1968), Mercian Hymns
(1971), Tenebrae (1978), The
Mystery of the Charity of
Charles Péguy(1983), The
Triumph of Love(1998), New
and Collected Poems(1994),
Speech! Speech!(2000), The
Orchards of Syon(2002),
Without Title(2006) and
several more. His Collected
Poemsare to appear in 2013.Tony Harrison (1937– )
Born and educated in Leeds.
Poetry collections: The School
of Eloquence(1978), v.
(1985); translations: The
Mysteries(1985), The
Trackers of Oxyrhyncus(1990)
and many more. In Penguin
Modern Poets 5, with Simon
Armitage and Sean O’Brien.