I first met Ted Hughes more than forty years ago, in late 1963, or early 1964, when he read at the Oxford University Poetry Society. Afterwards, everyone retired to the Lamb and Flag in St Giles. There Ted drank two modest half pints of beer and answered questions from tyro poets. I remember he told one earnest undergraduate – who had been boring about the number of revisions he made to his poems – that it was as Keats said, poetry should be natural and should come as easily as leaves to the tree.

I had been given his first two collections, The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, in 1962. These were exemplary books for me, and Ted was a major influence. (If it doesn’t show, that’s just because I was canny enough to steer clear of animals.) I also had seen Al Alvarez’s memorial note about Sylvia Plath in the Observer – lamenting the incalculable loss to poetry, reprinting “Edge” and “Contusion” – so I’d bought Ariel and read it with difficulty. Ted’s poetry was easier, I thought.
That evening I walked Ted back to his hotel on the High Street, and we talked. When I asked him how he’d first got his work published, he said he had had a very ambitious and industrious American wife who regularly sent out his poems and kept a card index of their progress. He asked me, knowing I was a fellow Northerner, if I was happy at Oxford. I wasn’t. I was reading PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). Symbolic logic was beyond me. Economic theory was a mixture of graphs and terror. I still remember that my economics tutorials were on Thursdays at five. By four o’clock my shirts were drenched in sweat down to the cuffs. (At the end of the year, I changed to English and was happier.) Ted, who’d changed from the English tripos at Cambridge to Archaeology and Anthropology, advised me to leave Oxford if I wanted to write. The next time I met him, fourteen years later, he remembered our talk – and pointed out reproachfully that, counter to his advice, I’d stayed on in Oxford ever since.

Lots of things are typical of Ted in this little reminiscence. First, the careful attention he paid to my end of the conversation. Secondly, the radical advice (he once urged Seamus Heaney to give up academe and become an eel-fisherman – and Seamus did go so far as to give up his teaching job and leave Northern Ireland, for the Republic and life as a full-time writer). Thirdly, he remembered the conversation fourteen, fifteen years later. Ted had more charisma than anyone I’ve ever met, and a lot of that charisma came from the quiet intensity he directed outwards. He wasn’t self-absorbed, he was attentive. In this way, the poems were extensions of his natural personality. Sylvia Plath is an example of the egotistical sublime: her subject is herself, her predicament, her violent Romantic emotions. She is a capital I, whereas Ted is an eye, a seeing eye, something looking at what is outside. He is Keatsian. (Keats said that when he saw sparrows he was there with them pecking in the gravel.)

But I don’t want to suggest that he simply sat there radioactive with taciturn charisma. He was a great talker, a spellbinding talker, after an initial statutory Yorkshire reluctance. He always seemed to weigh his words, unexcitable, calm, measured, but in fact he was a fluent and brilliant talker. The best account of this is Ben Sonnenberg’s, in his memoir Lost Property:

“Ted Hughes was tall and rough-featured and dark, with a dark baritone voice . . . . I wrote in my notebook that meeting him I felt like Hazlitt meeting Coleridge for the first time: bowled over by his warmth and energy. Listening to him, I did in fact fall off my chair. When he helped me up from the floor, I wrote in my notebook, “He didn’t stop talking and I felt the vibration of his voice running down his arm”.”

When he was with friends, he was very unbuttoned, very unguarded for a man hounded all his life by the press. In a profile I wrote when he was appointed Poet Laureate, I mentioned “pheromones” and “foot boards” rather cryptically as subjects on which Ted had interesting things to say. I think I was then being more discreet, more protective, than I need to be now. He told me that if you had an aerosol of pig pheromones, it worked with human beings. If you sprayed one seat in, say, the Festival Hall and asked a woman to choose any seat in the house, she would choose the seat sprayed with pheromones. The pheromones had been developed for artificial insemination of sows. Ted acquired an aerosol can and one night at his home, Court Green, at the close of an edgy dinner party to which his guests, the Baskins (Leonard Baskin’s portrait of Ted in bas-relief is shown on the cover of this issue) had arrived late after a quarrel, he went into the drawing room where there would be coffee – and let rip with the aerosol. The conversation became livelier, intense, competitive as the males fought for attention.

Ted was always interesting about sex. He once told me that the majority of back problems were caused by the lack of a footboard on the modern bed – which meant that there was nothing to push against and give you proper purchase. I remember, too, saying that his title Some Insects, Some Beasts, Some Flowers was ungainly. Somehow, I said, the title implied a mechanical progress through an index of possible subjects. What next? Some Amphibia? He simplified it – to Flowers and Insects. But en passant he said that he thought poetic subjects were like women: you saturated them with attention – and then moved on. There was one moment of curious pudeur. When Jacqueline Rose published her book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Ted was very agitated by her interpretation of “The Rabbit Catcher”, which she claimed described an act of oral sex. It doesn’t, in fact. But I could not understand why Ted was so upset: after all, acts of oral sex are not unknown among couples who have been married for quite a long time. In fact, “The Rabbit Catcher” isn’t about Ted and Sylvia at all, let alone the details of their sex life. It is squarely about Sylvia’s fascinated relationship with death – who is here the rabbit catcher.

Ted was a great storyteller: for example, his version of the day he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In the morning he and Carol, his second wife, met Sir John Betjeman at a hotel near Buckingham Palace. They drank quite a lot of vodka and tonics before setting off for Buckingham Palace in a cab. At the Palace, they drove into the inner courtyard – where there was an awning and a red carpet. Betjeman at that time was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and had drunk a fair bit. He emerged from the cab on his hands and knees and, playing it for laughs, began to crawl up the red carpet, hooting with laughter. Carol was stopped by an equerry from taking photographs. Inside the palace, they drank sherry because everything was behind schedule. The Queen was delayed, having sherry with a Commonwealth Prime Minister. More sherry was pressed on Ted and Sir John. Finally, more than a little tipsy, they left Carol behind and ascended in a small golden lift to Her Majesty’s chambers. Betjeman comically scratched the gold of the lift and wondered if it was twenty-four-carat. Then the double doors opened on the Queen. She too was merry by this time. She was also very small. Ted: “You know she’s small, but this was like meeting Alice in Wonderland. She’s this big” – and he measured an inch between his finger and thumb.

Ted planned to engage the Queen in conversation about farming and fishing, but she was well briefed and kept bringing the conversation back to his poetry. Then the interview was over. Ted and Sir John retreated backwards from the royal presence and closed the double doors behind them. At which point, they remembered that the Queen had not given Ted the medal for poetry. They tapped and re-entered. The Queen laughed and went to take the medal from a mantelpiece. It fell and rolled under the grand piano. Ted, Betjeman and the Queen all crawled under the piano to retrieve the medal . . . . According to Carol, this colourful conclusion has been enhanced in the telling. They didn’t leave the room. The medal was dropped by the Queen – who was sober as one of her own judges – and it was retrieved by Ted. In his account written for his daughter Frieda, there is great comedy at the Moss Bros fitting on the very morning of the presentation, the lift is described as a little palace in itself, the bow from the neck is practised, Ted is smitten by the Queen – and the medal isn’t dropped at all.

But Ted was an even greater letter-writer. The Collected Letters will be like immersing yourself into a fully functional ecosystem – if we ever get to see them in their entirety. There are far too many for a conventional commercial publishing project. Of course, we are all looking forward to Christopher Reid’s Selected Letters. But a proper Collected will be magnificently unbuttoned and visionary. By visionary I mean an unsleeping consciousness of the metaphysical shadow cast by even ordinary events. Ted was always interested in the shared border between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the physical and the metaphysical. For Ted, conventional reality overlaid something else, something larger. It was like wallpaper – and he was interested in lifting a corner, making a tear, to discover what was hidden underneath.

When he was interviewed by Clive Wilmer for a BBC Radio 3 programme, “Poets Talking”, in 1992, he expatiated on the role of myth in his poetry:

“Looking back now at my first books, I can trace odd leading images directly back to certain mythical things that interested me. For instance, the “Hawk Roosting”. He’s a straight monologue for a notion of the Egyptian hawk, Horus: the immortal hawk who is the eye of the sun, who flies through all hawks, or who absorbs all hawks. In a sense I was trying to raise the creatures that I’d encountered in my boyhood in South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. I was trying to raise them into some mythic frieze. I was thinking of them as a sort of mural. The pike, for instance: they were to be angels hanging in the aura of the Creator. So they were just hanging in the great ball of light, just pulsing away there, very still, because they were originally angels. My model, I remember, was Blake’s “Tyger”. I was thinking, if I could raise my pike to that kind of intensity and generality! That was the ideal. There were much more obvious efforts to do that in the original draft, but I cut them out and left myself with the old South Yorkshire fish. But that was the original purpose and motivation behind the poem itself, and so too with the hawk. So too with some others.”

So the bull Moses is not idly named. Two things about the biblical Moses are relevant: one is the encounter with God in the burning bush, the ordinary object from which divinity blazes forth. The other is the element of Tantalus in the Moses story. He leads the Israelites through the desert but cannot himself enter the Promised Land, merely view it from the top of Mount Pisgah. He is a liminal figure – like T. S. Eliot’s Magi or Simeon, poised on the brink of something larger. This is something Eliot holds in common with Ted. In a famous interview with Egbert Faas in the London Magazine (January 1971), Ted said: “I was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there”. So naturally he is interested in any potential intermediary. In “The Bull Moses”, the bull belongs to another world, another order of existence: “nothing of our light / Found any reflection in him”. He is a captive in our universe: “The weight of the sun and the moon and the world hammered / To a ring of brass through his nostrils”. We sense “the locked black of his powers” – and the emphasis is on “locked”. The poem closes with the boy Hughes closing and bolting the bull’s pen. The paradox is the tension between the torpor of the bull and the untold potential of its power. It is, then, paradigmatic: it stands for the world of ordinary experience, the unremarkable passage of time, and the potential explosion of power, of nuclear fission.

I invoke nuclear fission deliberately because Ted evokes it, too, in his brilliant parable poem, “Football at Slack”. Football is a deliberately unpromising starting point for an inquiry into the metaphysical, the hidden divine. So is the place name – Slack. In a sense, “Football at Slack” is part of a generalized topos shared by many twentieth-century poets living in a predominantly secular world: it is the movement from the deliberately flat, the calculatedly banal to the enhanced acoustic of the sacred sounding itself like a massed choir. Think of Larkin’s “High Windows”; and Seamus Heaney exploits this method throughout his volume Seeing Things, as does Eliot in “The Journey of the Magi”, in which, starting from Lancelot Andrewes’s insistence on the mundane – crucially elaborated by Eliot – we eventually reach the final, baffling confrontation with the divine and its accompanying sensation of fear and diminishment. In “Football at Slack”, Ted begins with a kind of comedy, a disguised Hopkinsian rodeo: “Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill / Men in bunting colours / Bounced, and their blown ball bounced”. It’s hard not to think of Douanier Rousseau’s striped Victorian footballers with their cloned moustaches and their eyes off the ball as if they were really a corps de ballet. There is something verging on the farcical.

The fusion of farce and the frightening is something Ted understood very well. In a letter to me in 1979, he wrote about my second book, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: “That double exposure of comic and seriously horrible is very real”. Spot on for my poetry, but spot on for Ted’s poetry also. Double exposure is exactly what many of Ted’s poems are about: the hawk and Horus; the pike as angels. And, here, drenched footballers as a type of religious Dervish seeking entrancement through the physical. The “rain lowered a steel press” but “their shouts bobbed up / Coming fine and thin, washed and happy // While the humped world sank foundering . . .”. So the world we know is a sinking ship, about to go to the bottom; the footballers, however, are survivors. They have a life after death, which Ted describes in visionary, surreal, yet at the same time realistic and recognizable terms: “But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air / And the goalie flew horizontal // And once again a golden holocaust / Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them”. So, the sun reappears around a cloud, the goalkeeper dives to make a save, and working their legs for extra height the wingers attempt to head a high ball. That is the cover story, the realistic alibi. But what we have read is the destruction of the world, the saved suddenly freed from the laws of physics and watched by the burning presence of divinity.

“Suntruck”, the poem that follows this one in Remains of Elmet, is a companion piece, another parable, another double exposure – this time about cricket. Ted’s poem uses the idea of the boundary and the pitch between the two wickets as a metonymy for all the limitations of the conventional world that prevent transcendence. “And the legs running for dear life, twinkling white / In the cage of wickets / Were cornered again by the ball, pinned to the crease, / Tethered to the green and white pavilion.” The idea is that the excitement of the game might release us from these limitations, enable us to cross some frontier into a different spiritual dimension: “Fleeing after the ball, stampeding / Through that sudden hole in Saturday . . .”. It is part of Ted’s genius that he should marry this craving for transcendence to something humanly recognizable – the craving for a weekend free of work. Here he invokes the threat of the working week and contrasts the sense of liberty at the weekend: failure to escape means returning to “the wage-mirage sparkle of mills / Toward Lord Savile’s heather / as a keeper or a beater / Toward the veto of the poisonous Calder . . .” (the river ruined by work, by industrial pollution). The poem ends with the idea of a futile life lived unsuccessfully, a sense of transcendence unfulfilled. At the end of the day, the home the cricketers return to isn’t simply home. It is also the long home, the final resting place. And Ted ends with a double exposure: “the cool sheet and the black slot of home”. That cool sheet is also a winding sheet and the black slot is also the grave.

This double exposure in which something is simultaneously itself and also something else occurs at the end of “The Moon and Little Frieda”, when Frieda suddenly sees the risen moon: “‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’ / The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work / That points at him amazed”. The conceit is the idea of art holding up a mirror to life. So the artist is the amazed moon reflected in the amazed face of little Frieda. The artist, then, is in two places at once – not a classic overlaid double exposure, but in two places simultaneously, in space and aggrandized, as well as on terra firma and smaller. But, as always in Ted’s poetry, the microcosm and the macrocosm are in a two-way relationship. (Incidentally, this poem explains the end of “Gnat-Psalm”, the poem immediately preceding. The arrangement of the poems in Ted’s collections is not an accident, but is meant to help the reader. “Gnat-Psalm” ends: “Your dancing / Your dancing / Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space”. Which means, at the obvious level, that these very small gnats have transported him to the infinite spaces that so fascinated and terrified Pascal: more microcosm leading to macrocosm. It also means that the moon represents his skull – an image possibly borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s “Edge”: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone”.)

The concept of double exposure is useful, too, when we consider Ted’s critique of Emily Dickinson, his accounts of Sylvia Plath, his take on T. S Eliot and of course on Shakespeare. I want to come at them via a reminiscence. When William Golding died, there was a memorial service at Salisbury Cathedral, Golding’s model for The Spire. Ted read from The Inheritors – the passage where Fa is sent to the ice women to intercede with Oa, the earth goddess, for the life of Mal, who is dying of old age. “Without help Mal will die. Fa must take a present to the ice women and speak for him to Oa.” It is easy to see why Ted chose this passage, rather than, say, the very poignant description of Mal’s death. It is a passage which embodies a belief in the Goddess of Complete Being or Mother Nature. For Golding, such a belief is primitive and imaginatively necessary, imaginatively plausible. He is a novelist, practising his craft. For Ted, it is fundamental rather than primitive, part of his bedrock belief system. The passage goes like this: “The place was huge and open. It was walled with rock; and everywhere ice-ivy plants reached upwards until they were spread out high above his head on the rock . . .” (it is a kind of natural Gothic cathedral).

“Their high branches vanished into caverns of ice. Lok [the male Neanderthaler, who has blundered after Fa] stood back and looked up at Fa who had gone higher towards the other end of the sanctuary.

She crouched on the stones and lifted up the parcel of meat. There was no sound, not even the noise of the fall. Fa began to speak in little more than a whisper. At first he could hear individual words, “Oa” and “Mal”: but the walls rejected the words so that they bounded back and were thrown again. “Oa” said the wall and the great ivy, and the wall behind Lok sang “Oa Oa Oa”.”

When Ted read this in the Cathedral, he threw his voice upwards – and it was electrifying, as if some great creature of sound, at once a bird and a beast, was panicking and crashing around the stone, trapped and desperate to escape. Sound effects aside, here was a great collision of pagan and Christian beliefs – but also a celebration of the sacred that transcended both. It was a double exposure.

My implication here is that Ted the critic is often acute but often the helpless hijacker. He was a systematizer who engrossed into his pattern of thought nearly everything that crossed his consciousness. And always, instinctively, he sought out the larger pattern, the transcendent shape. In this, he is a little like Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. There Lily Briscoe observes Mr and Mrs Ramsay as archetypal shapes, as symbolic entities, rather than edgy individual consciousnesses, distinctive with detail:

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball. That is what Mrs Ramsay tried to tell me the other night, she thought. For she was wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches.”

The hybridity of experience, the second sense of Platonic shapes, is most famously embodied in this sentence from To the Lighthouse describing the dinner with the boeuf en daube: “it partook, she thought, carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity”. The same admixture, the same fusion of the permanent and godlike with the ordinary is to be found also in Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things”, which ends with Maud Gonne “waiting a train” at Howth Station – like anyone else, you might think, until Yeats adds “Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head”. The duality here, between Olympus and Howth railway station, is exactly paralleled in To the Lighthouse, where Mr Bankes imagines Mrs Ramsay at the other end of the phone: “He saw her at the end of the line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows to compose that face. Yes, he would catch the 10.30 at Euston”. Ted shares this propensity to see the symbolical outline around the ordinary. And he often identifies it in other writers, sometimes too readily.
He makes Eliot a shaman, for example, in his essay “The Poetic Self: A centenary tribute to T. S. Eliot”. Ted was very open to apparently heterodox ideas. He wrote me a letter praising my interpretation of The Waste Land as a Buddhist poem – wondering what the academic world would make of it. (Not much, I can tell you.) He was persuaded, however, and I’ll quote a bit of his letter, not because I’m praised, but because it shows Ted’s gift for analogy and metaphor:

“It [my essay] reminded me a little of a QC I watched at a Public Enquiry in North Devon. His evidence wasn’t to be questioned. But the way he delivered it was the surprising thing. He didn’t orate, or ingratiate or solemnly browbeat or morally orchestrate or flood us with the usual courtly cant. He simply gave each piece of evidence, one piece at a time, each piece in a great silence. He would lay the piece out, without any interpretation, in a clean sentence, and then wait. He’d wait about ten or fifteen seconds – a very long time in an electrified court. The effect, the real dramatic kinetic impact of each piece was quite stunning. And the argument that rose out of the whole sequence was irresistible”

Then Ted adds in ink: “This struck me – because I was on the opposite side”. In the case of Eliot and Buddhism, though, we were on the same side – that is, well away from the centres of academic orthodoxy. Ted had already drafted, if not finished, “The Poetic Self: A centenary tribute to T. S. Eliot” by 1988. His letter to me is dated January 1989. In it, typically, Ted is interested in the general role played by Buddhism in twentieth-century poetry. He is particularly alert to the irony that academic Eliot should make hippy Buddhist Ginsberg and his followers look so belated. “Did anybody in those days point out that the great Western Buddhist poem had already been written – by the one they regarded as on the whole a figurehead of the enemy and the ‘academics’? Or that there must be some level on which those Beats were Eliot’s epigoni – and that W. C. Williams was, by comparison, the ‘academic’?” Ted’s thesis about Eliot is an idiosyncratic remodelling of the relatively familiar, but arguable idea that great poets are great because they express the zeitgeist. There are two problems with this. The first is with the idea of the zeitgeist itself, and is expressed in the opening words of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”. In other words, there is always sufficient historical evidence to support plausible but opposing views of any historical period. The second is that each era has tendencies which are opposed by its best writers. Arnold is a great critic of Victorian values, so is Dickens, so is Wilde. They constitute an alternative, oppositional zeitgeist, which is more successful than the original zeitgeist they opposed – whose features and characteristics we must deduce from the arguments put by great writers against them. When Ted comes to identify the zeitgeist flowing through his favourite writers, it tends to be the crisis he himself is preoccupied by. So Eliot, like Yeats, is a shaman who takes on the flaws, the illnesses, the diseases of his time – and cures them.

And what would you expect those illnesses to be, given Ted’s predilections and propensities? Exactly:

“The undertow of Eliot’s early tortured self-examination was the knowledge that this had irreversibly happened, that religious institutions and rituals had ceased to be real in the old sense, and that they continued to exist only as forms of “make-believe”, ways of behaviour rather than of belief. A new kind of reality had supplanted them. In the twinkling of an eye, as Nostradamus would say, the whole metaphysical universe centred on God had vanished from its place. It had evaporated, with all its meanings. This emptiness was Eliot’s starting point.

Ted’s essay continues:

“We see now that Eliot was the poet who brought the full implication of that moment into consciousness . . . . That desacralized landscape had never been seen before. Or if it had been glimpsed, it had never before been real . . .”.

My problem with this eloquent and ingenious overview of Eliot is that he was not converted until 1927, and he did not begin as a spiritual poet manqué. Although The Waste Land does address the condition of spiritual aridity, with the desert as emblem, much of the early poetry is social, ironic, comic, with a completely different focus – a focus, a preoccupation, which turns on a fruitful contradiction in Eliot: that between his dislike of sentimental exaggeration of feeling and his resolve to feel to the full. I do not think “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is about the “convulsive desacralization of the spirit of the West”, I think it is about a man who is too timid to proposition or propose to a woman who is his social superior.

I think the same reservation will apply to Ted’s introduction to his selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Emily Dickinson is the author of several orthodox Christian poems and many more poems that are sarcastic critiques of Christianity. She was an atheist, as she explained to T. W. Higginson: “they [the rest of the family] are religious – except me – and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father’”. It couldn’t be clearer. The orthodox Christian poems are written specifically for orthodox Christian recipients, often as commiseration for the death of a young child – not a situation in which even a militant atheist such as Richard Dawkins would come on like, well, Richard Dawkins, attacking the consolation of the afterlife. Ted, though, presents Emily Dickinson as the unconscious crucible containing the warring spiritual elements of her era: “At that time, the old Calvinism of the New England States was in open battle against the spirit of the new age – the Higher Criticism that was dissolving the Bible, the broadening, liberalising influence of Transcendentalism, the general scientific scepticism which, in America, was doubly rabid under the backlash of the ruthless, selective pragmatism of the frontier . . .”. So, religion and the forces of scepticism and change. Where does Ted think Emily Dickinson stands? “She quarantined herself in Jonathan Edwards’s faith that the visible Universe was ‘an emanation of God for the pure joy of Creation in which creatures find their justification by yielding assent to the beauty of the whole, even though it slay them’” (quotation from Jonathan Edwards, not Emily Dickinson herself).

Where does Ted get the idea that Dickinson is interested in the divine? Via a misreading of a group of her poems – addressed to a Master – which Ted quotes: “Title divine – is Mine! / The Wife – without the Sign!”. For Ted, this represents the transference of human love to something spiritual – from secular to sacred. But we know enough about Emily Dickinson’s love life to see how much it flourished, despite her agoraphobia and her single state. She didn’t mind being the Wife without the legal title. There are several candidates for her lovers – the already married Otis P. Lord or the Revd Charles Wadsworth. What she did not want, evidently, was a regular domestic set-up, the grind of marital dailiness. She seems to have felt that great love was not for everyday use. She admired her Yorkshire girls, the Brontës, for the purity of their passion.

The paradigm of the double exposure is perfectly illustrated by Eliot and Dickinson. Eliot’s writing, Ted argues, is underpinned by a fundamental spiritual crisis, whatever the ostensible subject happens to be. Emily Dickinson embodies, undecided, the spiritual issues of her time. “She reserved herself in some final suspension of judgment. So her poems record not only her ecstatic devotion” (sacred imagery used for secular purposes, I’d say), “but the drama of her sharp, sceptical independence, her doubt, and what repeatedly opens under her ecstasy – her despair.” Those last saving sentences are crucial. They express a reservation about the thesis itself. Suddenly we are confronted with the Emily Dickinson we know from the poetry – the poet of depression who complements the poet of great romantic passion. Without this crucial qualification, Ted’s essay would be parti pris to the point of obtuseness. As it is, his religious reading of Emily Dickinson is markedly skewed, if still influential – influential because we like the idea that under the particulars of individual poems there exists a single key. There is still an Edward Casaubon in us all, yearning for the key to all mythologies.

As there sometimes is. Ted is absolutely correct about the template unifying Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, what he called in a letter to me “the DNA of her poetic metabolism” – the great drama of death and rebirth that is so clearly played out in The Bell Jar as a theme and variations. This is how Ted described it in his letter (November 13, 1989):

“It is based on a psychic map – an actual drawing, which is a sort of calibrated register between the two extreme poles of her system – of her double personality. Each of her poems can be placed pretty well exactly on the register by simply reading off the evident psychic components – her very systematised and consistent hieroglyphs, and fitting them to the calibration. At one extreme are the frigidly brittle self-protective. At the other extreme, the rawest of Ariel. At each extreme, the poems carry an image of the other extreme – as a remote, self-contained condition.”

What follows is remarkably similar to the Yeatsian idea of interlocking gyres:

“As the poem moves from one extreme towards the other (in practice nearly all are moving from cold to hot), that self-contained image of the other grows more active and obvious. At a certain midway point, the balance is precarious. Beyond that point, the image of the extreme which has been left becomes self-enclosed and submerged. And so on. The map is also an anatomy of her psychic organism – the deployment of her internalised father and mother in the forms that her history had given them. So it seems very clear, for instance, that as she moved towards the liberation of her real voice, she moved towards the liberation of her child self, which was actually in the grave with her dead father. When she liberated her dead father which was also her real/her child self in the grave, she raised her own death. It doesn’t mean she had to die. There must have been many ways she could have extricated her child self from its death communion in her dead father’s embrace. But it meant she was in real danger – that she couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Or to have mistakes made for her – which they were. So the map is a kind of chart of her descent into the underworld where her dead father lies (her child/real self tight in his arms) ready to be awakened. The poems tell the story of the descent, the awakening, of her turning to make the re-ascent – having taken her child self from her dead father. What happened then? She had made the first steps upward when whatever happened happened.”

As for Ted’s reading of Shakespeare, there is again the controlling template. Again Ted uses the metaphor of the “tragic/dramatic/poetic DNA”. In the same letter that he writes about Sylvia, he outlines his scheme for Shakespeare. At the behest of Donya Feuer, a director at the Swedish National Theatre, Ted was to create a single drama from Shakespeare’s last thirteen plays – “crushed into a single drama, or rather . . . dismantled and then reassembled as a single complex, like an immense Rubik cube in a spontaneous slow-motion solving of itself”. Ted’s idea is summarized clearly in a letter (June 20, 1990) to me and my wife, a Shakespearean scholar: “a single tragic myth, made out of the plots of the 2 long poems [The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis] and used as a dramatic template for all the tragedies”. Essentially, Ted identifies a double exposure in Shakespeare: an interchange between the repressive Puritan imperative and the old pagan worship of Nature and sex.

Like Eliot, Shakespeare is expressing the zeitgeist – the conflict between repression and licence. The pagan imperative, in Ted’s account, survives in Catholicism, which is paganism adapted for everyday use: another double exposure. The Virgin Mary is also the pagan Venus. In Shakespeare’s later plays the one impulse is constantly and suddenly taken over by the other. The predatory Tarquin is superseded by the sexually reluctant Adonis. And vice versa. The clearest example is Measure for Measure, though that was not part of Ted’s account until my wife pointed out to him how perfectly Angelo, who begins as a Puritan but ends by being licentious, fitted his schema. In his November, 1989, letter Ted summarized his general position by proposing a book about Eliot, Plath and Shakespeare: “. . . I don’t think the disproportion in some aspects of stature matters: my point is that all three are exclusively mythical poets, writing only out of their myth (once it has evolved and become active) or rather only within their myth – being unable, actually, to write outside it”. Three double exposures, in fact.

One last example, just to show how deep it goes in Ted’s thinking. Among the great joys of his Collected Poems, edited by Paul Keegan, are the previously uncollected items. One of my favourites is “Fly Inspects” – in which Ted inverts our prejudice, our association of the fly with dirt and unhealthiness. He offers us instead the counterintuitive, paradoxical perception of the fly as a sanitary inspector. The wit of this, the sustained invention of the conceit, only works if we remain aware that the fly spreads germs in reality. It begins: “Fly / Is the Sanitary Inspector. He detects every speck / With his Geiger counter. / Detects it, then inspects it / Through his multiple spectacles. You see him everywhere / Bent over his microscope . . .”. What I love here are the lavish verbal effects that reproduce the fly’s meticulous examination of the minutiae: the sounds move on only fractionally. Inspector; detects every speck; multiple spectacles. Of course, all metaphor involves double exposure. As readers, we are aware of the thing being described and the thing it is compared to. No wonder the idea of double exposure is central to Ted’s criticism and poetry, and no wonder I was so drawn to him forty years ago. He is a great metaphorical writer.

--------------------------------------------------------

This is an edited version of the keynote address at the Fifth International Ted Hughes Conference at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, October 5, 2005.

Craig Raine's In Defense of T. S. Eliot: Literary essays and Collected Poems 1978-1999 both appeared in 2000. He is the Editor of Areté.