Table Of ContentThe Elegies of Ted Hughes
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The Elegies of Ted Hughes
Edward Hadley
© Edward Hadley 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-23218-1
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-31251-1 ISBN 978-0-230-28141-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230281417
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hadley, Edward, 1983–
The elegies of Ted Hughes / Edward Hadley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-31251-1
1. Hughes, Ted, 1930–1998–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Elegiac
poetry, English–History and criticism. I. Title.
PR6058.U37Z6959 2010
821’.914–dc22 2010002688
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
For my family
and my friends
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1. Griefs for Dead Soldiers 15
2. Instinct for Loss 30
3. Singers of a Lost Kingdom 54
4. Moortown Elegies? 71
5. The Fruitful River 82
6. Dust As We Are 102
7. Nobody Else Remembers 121
Epilogue 144
Notes 156
Bibliography 170
Index 178
vii
Acknowledgements
The poetry of Ted Hughes (including ‘The swallow rebuilding’,
‘Atavist’ from ‘Three Poems for J.R.’, ‘Finale’ and ‘Six Young Men’) is
reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., Farrar Straus &
Giroux and the Estate of Ted Hughes. Extracts from Peter M. Sacks’s
The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats(pp. 18–20,
27, 33–4, 55–6, 85, 103, 114, 136, 148, 168) © 1985 are reprinted
with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
For the effort, generosity and support which they have shown me
in a variety of forms, I am indebted to the following: Daniel Bird,
Carol Hughes, Paula Kennedy, Andrew Motion, Bernard O’Donaghue,
Michael O’Neill, Gareth Reeves, Stephen Regan, Neil Roberts, Keith
Sagar and Ann Skea. To all of you, my most sincere thanks.
Finally, I would also like to thank my family and friends for
enduring me through the highs and lows of my research and its
transformation from a PhD thesis into my first book. Your unwaver-
ing encouragement is most gratefully acknowledged.
Introduction
Whilst his poetry has been widely criticized for its apparent pre-
occupation with violence and death, it is puzzling that the links these
topics have in common with elegy have never been clearly verified
in Ted Hughes’s poetry and have gone largely unnoticed in the diverse
criticisms of his work. This might be because Hughes’s poems do not
appear to bear the obvious elegiac characteristics frequently associated
with traditional poetic laments; but closer scrutiny reveals not only
acts of resistance, but also a great many similarities within the broad
scope of elegy. Drawing on a ‘vital relationship with tradition’, he
deftly invokes the generic properties of elegy without in any way fol-
lowing them slavishly, creating ‘a dialogue with it both consciously
and unconsciously’.1
It might be said that elegy is answering death, and that the work
of the elegist is to reaffirm emotions, or rather, place bereavement
and loss in a context appropriate to their skill, to expostulate grief in
a manner befitting their medium. The elegy is there to preserve the
dead as long as possible so they may co-exist with the living or be
embalmed immortally in the print of the written word. Where Hughes
does participate in the elegiac tradition, he draws on conventions that
include ‘a procession of mourners, extended use of repetition and
refrain, antiphony or competition between voices, appeals and ques-
tionings of deities and witnesses, outbreaks of anger or criticism, offer-
ings of tribute and rewards, and the use of imagery such as water,
vegetation, sources of light, and emblems of sexual power drawn from
the natural world depicted as either injured victim or site of renewal’.2
Many of these practices are rooted in a tradition that reaches certainly
1
