adam piette
than living’^32 ).If the male poet harbours such beasts within his psychosomatic
system, as well as outside in the silos and bases of the Cold War, then every
relationship is similarly translated into something rich and dangerous by the fact
of the nuclear threat between East and West. Married to an American woman and
poet, translating male poets from the Communist East, Hughes felt the Cold War
rock his house with something approachingexhilaration. In ‘Wind’, every house
is subject to the ‘wind’ of nuclear holocaust (‘the brunt wind that dented the balls
of my eyes’), which, paradoxically, makes the domestic space sing as though under
aesthetic pressure: ‘The house||Rang like some fine green goblet in the note|That
any second would shatter it.’ Under threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (or
MAD), every man and wife is under the surveillance of a savage eye of death, figuring
the murderous arguments of the sex war: ‘wind wielded|Blade-light, luminous and
emerald,|Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.’^33 Again it is the Cold War which helps
to lift the self-consciousness of a couple’s paranoia into the transcendent realm of
art and war technology, the absolute poetry and politics of the ‘M.A.D. eye’ nuclear
sublime. Under the psychotically introjected dual gaze of ‘Russia and America’,
who ‘circle each other’ in ‘A Woman Unconscious’, lies the sacrificial victim of
the Cold War, the citizen imagination troped as a Plath figure dying in ‘the white
hospital bed’.^34
The Cold War acted as a form of double pressure, then, on poets in the 1950s
and 1960s, subjecting them to the blandishments and dependency resentment of
the special relationship to the west, and aligning them with the suffering and
example of dissident poets to the east. Both forms of pressure had a dispiriting
effect on the morale of poets on these islands. The American example produced
the infamous A. L. Alvarez introduction to the 1962 anthologyThe New Poetry,
accusing British poets of craven gentility, inveighing against the negative examples
of late Auden, Dylan Thomas, and the Movement controlling the machinery of
British poetry.^35 To the east, the example of the dissidents was palpable in the high
profile of poets such as Yevtushenko and Brodsky in sales and on the poetry circuit
(for example, the popularity of the Penguin Modern Poets and Penguin Modern
European Poets series). The net effect was to invite British poets to relocate,
in real and imaginary terms, to the States or Europe and beyond, to adopt an
itinerant lifestyle or writing style that renounced and redeemed UK provincialism
and its gentility principle. Heading west: Christopher Middleton to the University
of Texas; Lee Harwood publishing in New York alongside the New York school,
then writer-in-residence in San Francisco; Ken Smith teaching creative writing at
Clark University, his first collection coming out from Chicago’s Swallow Press in
(^32) Hughes, ‘Thrushes’, inCollected Poems, 82. Both ‘Thrushes’ and ‘Pike’ were written whilst
Hughes was working in the US (Spring 1958–Dec. 1959).
(^33) Hughes, ‘Wind’, ibid. 36. (^34) Hughes, ‘A Woman Unconscious’, ibid. 63.
(^35) A. L. Alvarez (ed.),The New Poetry(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). See also Alvarez’sUnder
Pressure: The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the U.S.A(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).