ABSTRACT
The flexible, open-ended style of the Moortown sequence seems to attest to the difficulty of finding any stable meaning in a world posited as indifferent to human concerns, a difficulty thematicized by focusing on Ted Hughes’s own experience of farming in Devon. The Real for Hughes is thus what human meaning covers over, what words veil; but it is also what may rend this veil at any moment. The direct, no-nonsense character of Yorkshire dialect Hughes finds rooted in social and historical contingencies: ‘A poverty/ That cut rock lumps for words’. In invoking these contingencies Remains of Elmet explicidy interrogates the ideologies that inform Hughes’s own consciousness. Hughes’s anthropomorphic imagery would at first glance seem to belie the possibility of reflecting anything but the ego’s Imaginary projections: Obsolete despairSmiles this toothless and senileMauve-pink flower.
