Hughes: Criticism

The Thought Fox: “The marriage of

inner and outer worlds” — Roberts

Hughes saw himself as “being destined to live more

or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in air”

“implicit”, “intense”—

Armitage

Title “creates an equilibrium between the

mature, full moon, and the waxing, little Frieda” — Armitage

“She wanted to be Cathy. And for the rest of his life,

he was Heathcliff, [..] who wanders the moors in search of his lost love” — Bate

Second half of ‘Bayonet Charge’ takes a “leap

into existential enquiry” — Armitage

[About his father’s experiences] “He managed

to convey the horror so nakedly it fairly tortured me” — Hughes

War: “The big, ever-present, overshadowing

thing was the First World War” — Hughes

“A war poet at one remove, writing out of the

impact of memory” — Walder

Impact of memory: “of his father, and the

collective memory of English culture” — Walder

War was “a lifelong

obsession for Hughes” — Meyers

“His father’s trauma and survivor’s guilt, passed

on to Hughes as a child” — Meyers

His father’s experiences “continued to torment

his life and influence his art” — Meyers

Hughes “combined the instinct to kill of fierce birds

with the instinct of men in war” — Meyers

“contrasted the natural world of gentler animals

with the murder of men in battle” — Meyers

War allowed for “the burning away of all human

pretensions in the ray cast by death” — Hughes

Hughes presents animals as “a disconcerting

experience with the other” — Mort

“I was all for opening negotiations with

whatever happened to be out there” — Hughes

Animals reflect “unpalatable truths about

ourselves” — Mort

Language in Lupercal is “a limited language,

but authentic to me” — Hughes

“As an imaginative writer, my only capital is

my own life” — Hughes

On Crow: “Super simple,

super ugly language” — Hughes

Crow: “Composed of the scraps and fragments

folklore, myth and religion” — Walder

Crow: a “ransacking” of other cultures, “dipping

into whatever serves his purpose”— Walder

Crow: “A mythical, symbolic creature [..] evoke[s]

a multitude of responses” — Walder

A Crow is “everything to every man [..] he who

was before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer and creator” — Walder

“The Crow is another word for [..] everything

extracted from a beast when it is gutted” — Hughes

“The Crow of a man is the essential man only

minus his human looking vehicle” — Hughes

On Crow: “Violence, originally limited and predatorial, is

now universal and apocalyptic” — G. Hughes

By Crow “his poetry had evolved into a loose

and stark mythic surrealism” — A. Armitage

“Hughes’ preoccupation with the neglected

inner life is apparent” — A. Armitage

“What excites my imagination is the war

between vitality and death” — Hughes

“You have to decide for yourself whether the poem can be understood to

glorify fascist militarism” (Walder)