ABSTRACT
These words-used by Ted Hughes in 1978 to describe his poetic research in Gaudete (1977)—could be used effectively to describe the general impression produced on the reader by Hughes’s poetic production: the long, contradictory intertextual ‘story’ of his macrotext-from the very early exper iences of The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his latest collection Wolfwatching (1990)2-a story forcing us ‘to stop dead at every moment’ while at the same time pushing us forward. The image of a complete and complex narration proceeding ‘in a forceful way’, yet meeting sudden moments of ‘solid resistance’, captures, moreover, the double power of Hughes’s verse to flow in the reader’s imagination, while at the same time creating obstacles to perception. Hughes’s attention seems in this quote to focus on the secret workings and laws of his poiein, and indirectly invite us to do the same: the sudden stops, changes and surprises in the language and rhythm of the single composition as well as in the various forms assumed by the collections should not, in other words, be considered as antithetical to the powerful continuity created in them by the word’s prosaic pushing and flowing ‘from beginning to end’. In spite of their apparent opposition, the stream and the stagnation, the movement and the moment coexist (as they had already done in the aesthetics of the modernists, from Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf, from T.S.Eliot to Dylan Thomas),3 as dynamic elements intensifying the reader’s consciousness of the poetic experience: in this sense we could almost say that the strength-what was once called the ‘violence’— of Hughes’s poetry, far from being a matter of stereotyped content, is an
effect largely derived by the word’s formal and metapoetic tension, by its power to suggest its own struggle-its agon-towards expression. Like any strong poetic act, Hughes’s is not ‘about’ something external, but is concerned above all with itself, with the linguistic, prosodic, visionary forces involved in its own creation, transformation and survival.
