ABSTRACT
In 1956, a year before Ted Hughes’s first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, appeared, Robert Conquest published an anthology of contemporary poetry called New Lines. Hughes looks towards Eastern Europe in Wodwo and Crow for a linguistic or poetic methodology, a way of approaching through language what is finally unspeakable. Hughes writes: The silence of artistic integrity ‘after Auschwitz’ is a real thing. Hughes draws on myth in a way that bears out on another level the implications of his ‘improvised’ language. His major work of non-fiction, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, is a massive and intricate reading of Shakespeare in terms of myth. Linked to Hughes’s use of myth is the poet’s interest in shamanism. According to Hughes: Shamanism is not religion, but a technique for moving in a state of ecstasy among the various spiritual realms, and for generally dealing with souls and spirits, in a practical way, in some practical crisis.
