Imagining Ted Hughes: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Symbolic Work of Collected Poems

Abstract

Hughes's recently published Collected Poems runs 1331 pages, the table of contents alone taking 29. It sits impressively on your local Barnes and Noble or Borders poetry shelf, cover facing out--the British counterpart to another hefty 2003 publication by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. (1) On the cover, a cross-legged, semireclined gazes absently away from the camera. Whatever his concerns are, they do not appear to be his immediate surroundings; his slightly parted lips are those of one deep in thought, lost in his own world. He is the inaccessible subject, the mystified poet (how we'd like to know what he's thinking!). Near the bottom of the photograph, where Hughes's large hands gently commune, a wedding band catches a bit of light: the husband is here as well. Today Ted Hughes is an extraordinarily loaded sign, the meaning of which will vary depending on the knowledge one brings to it. We might see the sexy, virile Hughes--the one reported by A. Alvarez to have made women weak in the knees on eye contact (qtd. in Malcolm 120), pictured here in open blazer, no tie, his thick head of hair swept haphazardly over and growing wildly around his ear. We might see the tortured artist, wrongly blamed for Sylvia Plath's death and demonized as the oppressive male--a callous brute in the Hemingway tradition, hyperbolized (again by Alvarez) as having gone through swaths of women, like a guy harvesting corn (212). We might see the warm and sympathetic figure from Elaine Feinstein's biography or the bloodsucking double of Plath's Daddy. Not to mention the destroyer of Plath's journals, the unfaithful husband, or the powerless, star-crossed of Birthday Letters. We might even see England's former poet laureate, or the author of such well-known works as Thought-Fox, Thistles, and Crow. Even the academically invested, approaching the book with specialized knowledge, are likely to bring with them a set of associations, if not judgments and strong feelings, stemming from the popular discourse surrounding Hughes's personal life--things that academics are not supposed to be concerned with, though they have become such an inextricable part of Hughes's cultural legacy that even the most diplomatic explicator of his poetry cannot leave them unaccounted for. It is a poetry collection's job, we might think, to suppress everything extraneous to the poetry itself, even when such things contribute to the book's market value. (2) The collection completes, confirms, and finalizes a writer's identity as a poet, promising not only that its contents all belong exclusively to the singular entity on its cover but also that the author's stature is such that it warrants their being collectively published. Nonetheless, the image on the cover of Collected Poems captures something of Hughes's split identity as a creator of poems on the one hand and a product of the popular imagination on the other. The photograph, taken in 1979 by Noel Chanan, renders neither the dashing young genius of the Sylvia Plath years nor the stouter, white-haired poet laureate. This falls somewhere in between: he has the sobered, reflective look of one who has suffered and who possesses a special wisdom because of that suffering. The photo avoids the kind of humanizing, direct subject-to-viewer connection established when a subject looks straight into the camera. is not interacting with his public or with the medium that will publicly represent him but is held aloof from our gaze--aestheticized in black-and-white print, as another's subject matter. We look contemplatively at Hughes, who looks elsewhere, contemplating. The author is suspended somewhere in between, untouchable, with only his ring to ground him socially (and even that, for Hughes, is a mythically charged sign). Approaching the author less as an individual personality than as a site where meaning is constructed, this essay will bear the influence of Michel Foucault. …