Now what about Sylvia's? Screwed over, again.
Nobody says it better than Def Leppard.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Ted Hughes in Poets' Corner
Now what about Sylvia's? Screwed over, again.
Nobody says it better than Def Leppard.
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13 comments:
you have to separate the two.... & stay out of the Politics of it !
bottom line ?
;we live/exist in a Sick Time...
what a bore the politics of poetry (and ev
ery thing else has become!
....size has nothing to do with intensity
I'm telling you
I'd drop out again, however
I fear
that this time
when I'd drop back in?
I'd be dead
I hear you, Ed
but if I ignore the Politics, I ignore Sylvia. I love the woman and her poetry too much for that.
He's the reason she stuck her head in an oven, and he gets to lie next to Eliot.
Sick Time, indeed.
read Linda Wagner-Martin's bio of Sylvia Plath.
my concern? lots of young girl poets or wanna-bee poets
especially those at university
have been imitating/mimicking
Sylvia's life-history
manic depression is not an easy thing to deal with.
who is responsible ? I just don't know.
both are solid poets.
also read Kay Redfield Jamison's
Touched with Fire : Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
seems to me that
it is a "rush" to put Hughes in Westminster Abbey's "Poet's Corner"
I was there in 1968 (or so) Chaucer's re-mains are there
I guess that Hughes is there via his Birthday Letters ? and OVID... Crow was terrific.
&
I tell y'all
it would have to be an 100% accident for me to kill myself
especially in my present period of this new-found
Acclaim !
I guess that if I was a Brit
I'd now be
the Poet Laureate of The Chelsea Embankment
(where I was on a house boat when, up the road
when I was there
Judy Garland killed herself I think, also, via a gas oven.
One has to ignore Plath's history of suicidal impulses and actions to lay the blame for her death at Hughes's door. It's also absurd to say that Plath is "all but forgotten." She has a couple of dozen in-print titles listed on Amazon, and her sales rankings are equal to or superior to any of Hughes's titles—fairly extraordinary, since he outlived her by 35-plus years. In any case, whether she deserves a memorial in Poets' Corner has nothing to do with whether or not Hughes deserves his place there. Their relationship, fraught and finally broken as it was, is irrelevant to their poetic accomplishments. As for lying next to Eliot—well, I wouldn't wish that on anyone!
Conrad,
I don't think Sylvia is "all but forgotten,"--I also think her poetry has a better chance of being remembered than Hughes'. So much for my opinion. (I've always thought Hughes came on a little too strong in most of his poetry--especially the much-vaunted "Crow").
Thanks Joseph, Vassilis
perhaps I've understated the case. But a memorial stone compared to Amazon sales figures says it all. And, again, I think what was probably a patriarchal republic of letters at the time purposely relegated Emily, Hughes' inspiration & mentor in so many ways, to second-rate status. Hughes, at best, a flowery nature poet, with a few mediocre translations...
What can I say: it pisses me off!
I was just &
suddenly s t r u c k:
what America needs .... right now...
is our very own Westminster Abbey-like
place
in which we can
off in one of the right-wing corners
burry our (Famous Poets) !
&
in the gift shop
we could sell post cards
with snaps of their tombs....
imprinted !
and
let us limit it to only those poets
(of ours) who have committed suicide:
there's a long list.
Ed,
actually I think it's a great idea. Some of the very best have come from the US: Whitman, Poe, James,Longfellow,Dickinson, etc etc.
Not a bad idea.
I wouldn't get too hung up about Poet's Corner if I were you Conrad. Personally, I regard it as a bit of a joke - anyway, neither Milton, Shakespeare or Blake are there, but a number of very minor poets are. Here's an amusing article about the place: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8938472/Ted-Hughes-memorial-Poets-Corner-is-a-white-elephants-graveyard.html
Alan,
thanks for putting it in some real perspective for me. I'm given to a little exaggeration sometimes.
This what I wrote about Hughes in a review about 6 or 7 years ago, and which I largely stand by: "'Birthday Letters' showed us why Hughes's writing about people was refracted through the simplifying medium of animals; he lacked the subtlety and psychological insight to write about people directly."
since then, I've softened my view, and I think there are elements, especially of the early work, which I admire. But I do think he's generally accorded too high a status.
That's an interesting observation.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic: some of his nature pieces are superb, actually. His strength lay there, but far too few of them to take notice. And certainly translation wasn't his thing; and those amateurish flowery 'birthday' poems for royalty he wrote as poet laureate-well,that's writing class stuff.
But a great poet, after Hill or Heaney, he isn't. Plath's poetry, on the other hand, stirs the soul to its ugly depths. Always an invitation to jump into the abyss.
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