Abstract
For a poet so preoccupied, in his essays, letters and interviews, with rhythm and verse music, Hughes’ own poetic rhythms have received strangely little sustained attention. Critics have pointed out his debt to Old and Middle English verse, but considerations of his use of rhythm have too often been limited to isolated comments on single poems, or have sidestepped into vaguer comments about his ‘language’.1 The historical and ideological connotations Hughes attached to rhythm in various essays have also been taken as applying rather too straightforwardly to his own verse, as Neil Roberts has pointed out.2 Hughes wrote eloquently of ‘the peculiar, inner music, the singing ensemble of psychological components, which determines the possibilities of [a poet’s] verse’ (WP 244), but criticism has yet to move beyond the premodern associations and identify more fully what Hughes’ own ‘inner music’ might be, or the extent to which it corresponds with his extra-poetic formulations of ‘musical composition’.3 Doing so brings the distinctive nature of Hughes’ poetry into sharper focus and reveals new aspects of, and new ways of connecting, individual poems and volumes. His inner music, once identified, can serve as an interpretative tool, a gauge by which to measure the shifting pressure of his characteristic preoccupations.
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Notes
Seamus Heaney (1980), ‘Englands of the Mind’ [1976], in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 150–73
Paul Bentley (1999), The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond (Harlow: Longman), p. 15
Keith Sagar (2006), The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes, 2nd rev. edn (Liverpool University Press), p. 52
Susan Bassnett (2009), Ted Hughes (Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House), p. 72.
Neil Roberts (2006), Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 25–6.
Ted Hughes (1957), ‘Ted Hughes Writes’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin 15, pp. 1–2.
Derek Attridge (1982), The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman), p. 77.
Ted Hughes (2011), ‘Unpublished Letters’, Areté 34, p. 18.
Jordi Doce (1997),’Two Extremes of a Continuum: On Translating Ted Hughes and Charles Tomlinson into Spanish’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 33:1, p. 50.
Ted Hughes (2000), Tales from Ovid (London: Penguin)
Ted Hughes (1964), Introduction to Keith Douglas, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber), p. 14.
Ekbert Faas (1980), Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press), pp. 197–208.
Seamus Heaney (1988), The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber & Faber), p. 15.
Craig Robinson (1989), Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 9.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1956), ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, in W.H. Gardner (ed.), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press), p. 95.
Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts (1981), Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 55–6.
Drue Heinz (1995), ‘Ted Hughes: The Art of Poetry LXXI’, Paris Review 134, p. 61.
Geoffrey Keynes (ed.) (1980), The Letters of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 46.
Michael Parker (1983), ‘Hughes and the Poets of Eastern Europe’, in Keith Sagar (ed.), The Achievement of Ted Hughes (Manchester University Press), p. 38.
Ted Hughes (2005), Ted Hughes Reading His Poetry [1996] (London: HarperCollins).
Roman Jakobson (1960), ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 350–78.
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© 2013 David Sergeant
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Sergeant, D. (2013). Ted Hughes’ Inner Music. In: Wormald, M., Roberts, N., Gifford, T. (eds) Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276582_5
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