ABSTRACT
In his brilliantly idiosyncratic essay 'Myths, Metres, Rhythms', Ted Hughes describes a review of his first volume The Hawk in the Rain by the poet Roy Fuller. Crucial to Hughes's argument is a lengthy consideration of Thomas Wyatt, and of Richard Tottel's metrical tidying-up of his work in 1557. Despite his overt anti-academicism and the often-recounted story of the dream-fox who told him to abandon the writing of literary-critical essays, Hughes's linguistic views are profoundly in tune with those of the Cambridge English school in which he began his own post-secondary education. The poetic instincts of English dialect are those of the almost lost alliterative tradition; and Hughes's combative sense of that tradition reserves particular opprobrium for the tidy editorializing of Shakespeare at the Restoration. Hughes conceives of Shakespeare's language, drawing on and developing its dialectal resources, as imperiously appropriative, experimental, and improvisatory.
