HUGHES: AO5

Question 1

NATURE + STYLE:
Lawrence KRAMER

• “Rain”
• “Wind”
• Animal Poems

Answer 1

“Sometimes, to break through the integral terror and radiance underlying a form or force of Nature,
Hughes will make his poem stammer, describing and re-describing the same thing… in the hope that insistent resignification will batter
down the doors of perception”

Question 2

Dennis WALDER

• Animal Poems

Answer 2

“Hughes’s animal creations…suggests a state of heightened, dream-like, even hallucinatory awareness”

Question 3

Terry GIFFORD and Neil ROBERTS

• “Jaguar”

Answer 3

“The poet is in some way identifying himself with the jaguar”
…
“The fact that it is caged makes the jaguar, of course, a natural representation of a man’s imprisoned animal energies”

Question 4

HUGHES vs ‘THE MOVEMENT’:

1. Seamus HEANEY
2. Paul BENTLEY

• ALL POEMS

Answer 4

1. HEANEY
   Hughes reacted against:
   “the Movement voice…Hughes’s great cry and call and bawl is that the English language and English poetry is longer and deeper and rougher than that.”
2. BENTLEY
   * Hughes…
   - Nature
   - Old English
   -> “Wodwo” - poem AND collection title
   -> Alliteration, compound words…
   - Topographical Poetry
   * …vs. ‘The Movement’
   - “Poetry of deliberately limited aims…they had naturally sought a more sceptical, commonsensical mode of expression [after WW2]”
   - Class - highes rejects the voice of “literate English middle-class culture” (HEANEY)
3. AO3
   - Hughes was inspired by Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess”, in which he argues the original function of the poet was to write hymns for the archaic matriarchal ‘Triple Goddess’
   -> Mythology

Question 4

CROW:
1. Paul RADIN
2. Keith SAGAR
3. Neil ROBERTS

• “Crow” Cycle

Answer 4

1. RADIN:
   “Crow’s resemblance to the trickster figure…is undeniable”
   …
   “His nature is paradoxical because he was before good and evil, a denier and affirmer, a destroyer and creator”
2. SAGAR:
   “He is the unkillable urge to keep trying in spite of everything”
3. ROBERTS + AO3:
   - Accompanied a series of anthropomorphic engravings of crows by Leonard Baskin
   - “He seemed to be assaulting religion and poetry simultaneously” (Neil ROBERTS)

Question 5

HUGHES as SHAMAN:
Eugene IONESCO

• “Jaguar”
• “Horses”
  …

Answer 5

Hughes acts as a “shaman, whose function is to make the dangerous journey, on behalf of his society, into the spirit world, which is to say, into his own unconscious”

Question 6

LUPERCAL + VIOLENCE
Jonathan BATES

• “Pike”
  …

Answer 6

“Lupercal is alive with the apprehension of violence in places where the readers would not normally expect it”

Question 7

HIRSCHBERG:

• Animal Poems

Answer 7

“Hughes immerses himself in the dark, irrational forces around and within him, in order to purge himself of the artificial social construct, the personality”
- ie. freeing the id