Traumatic Repetition in Capriccio

Abstract

In its original form, Capriccio was published in a limited edition with engravings by Ted Hughes’ friend and frequent collaborator Leonard Baskin. Only 50 copies of Capriccio in the ‘unsettled Spring of 1990’¹ were printed for sale to collectors. Embedded enigmatically with allusions to Cabbalistic lore, the Bible and ancient myths, Capriccio is a sequence of 20 poems about Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill and its tragic end in March of 1969 with her suicide and murder of her daughter Shura. Even though Hughes published eight poems from Capriccio in the 1995 New Selected Poems, hardly anyone noticed that Hughes was writing poetry about a major trauma in his personal life. The publication of Birthday Letters in January 1998 permanently altered our critical perception of his work. Its ballyhooed appearance invited precisely the biographically intrusive attention Hughes heretofore despised for his poetry, and only then did critics feel free to look retrospectively at Capriccio and other earlier work as potentially confessional.