Table Of ContentTed Hughes
and Trauma
Burning the Foxes
DANNY O’CONNOR
Ted Hughes and Trauma
Danny O’Connor
Ted Hughes
and Trauma
Burning the Foxes
Danny O’Connor
Department of English
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-55791-9 ISBN 978-1-137-55792-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55792-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947458
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have helped in shaping and creating this book. I would fi rstly
like to thank Neil Corcoran for his help and wisdom in getting this proj-
ect started. A huge thanks is owed to Deryn Rees-Jones for her tireless
support, her remarkable insight and unceasing advocacy for poetry itself.
Terry Gifford, Neil Roberts, Ann Skea and Mark Wormald have all been
of enormous assistance, answering Hughes-related queries and offering
encouragement along the way. Likewise Gillian Gorszewski, whose deep
knowledge of Hughes and droll humour has been the necessary measure
of many of my arguments. I would like thank my parents for their enor-
mous support, without whom this book would not have been possible—
my mother, in particular, for introducing me to Hughes. And above all
Emma, for putting up with me linking everything back to Ted Hughes.
v
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: A Tyrannical Reading of Ted Hughes 1
2 Hughes’s Creaturely Creatures 23
3 Hughes’s Landscape, Lacan’s Real 4 1
4 En Attendant Crow: Hughes with Sartre,
Camus and Beckett 59
5 Hughes Meets Bacon, Baskin and the Big Screen 7 9
6 Hughes and War Trauma 99
7 Hughes and the Burning of Literary Criticism 121
8 ‘She Did Life’: England Traumatised 1 41
vii
viii CONTENTS
9 Hughes, the Goddess and the ‘Foundational Fantasy’ 163
10 Conclusion: A New Classicism? 183
Bibliography 191
Index 201
1
Introduction: A Tyrannical Reading
of Ted Hughes
As a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Ted Hughes dreamed he
was still at his desk, struggling to write his weekly essay when ‘The door
opened & a creature came in’, a ‘long skinny’ fox, ‘but erect, & with
human hands’. This fox-man had ‘escaped from a fi re’, its skin ‘charred’
and ‘bleeding’ as he crossed the room, placed his hand on the poet’s page
and announced, ‘Stop this. You are destroying us’. When he removed
his hand from the page what remained was a ‘blood-print’. 1 From this
point onward—so the legend goes—Hughes devoted his life to poetry
and ‘burning the foxes’ becomes a byword for the destructiveness of liter-
ary criticism.
As critics, we stand before Hughes’s work with a jerry can of petrol and
a packet of matches. He envisions poems as a ‘kind of animal’: they have a
‘vivid life of their own’ that cannot be added or reduced without ‘maim-
ing and perhaps even killing them’. 2 The literary critic, serial butcher and
immolator, maims and kills by breaking the unity of a poem, investigat-
ing its inner workings in the way his empiricist St George of Crow cleaves
hearts ‘With a knife-edge of numbers’. 3 Schooled in the eviscerations of
Leavisite close reading, one could only have sympathy for a Hughes that
feared his own work might be anaesthetised and subject to the same dis-
sections, though he claims to have had ‘nearly a sadistic streak’ for such
criticism, he also felt that it was ‘deeply destructive’ of himself (L TH 423).
Conversely, Neil Roberts has corrected our view of Leavis representing a
damaging infl uence on Hughes’s burgeoning poetic talent, arguing that
Leavis’s understanding of poetic thinking is actually highly compatible
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1
D. O’Connor, Ted Hughes and Trauma,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55792-6_1
