NYR

Never too soon, I suppose, to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Not that I ever make any since they seem doomed to be abandoned.

How about this, I'm nevertheless wondering: I've never read the complete works of any major poet, so perhaps I should.

Ted Hughes not only read the complete poems of Yeats-- as a schoolboy -- but, he reckons (Letters), he knew them by heart.

One reason the resolution would be hard to carry through is that I can’t speed-read poetry. It has to be taken at reading-aloud speed.

Enacting the resolution would mean, for once, finishing what I've started, something I can do if for instance writing an article but not if exploring some area of knowledge for myself over a long period. But I'm not sure enacting it would even be wise; I tend to think that when I leave a thing half done to take up something else the impulse is often a sound one, and the sense that the other thing is exactly what I need right now is based on some real self-knowledge; my swerves off-piste and sudden redirections of attention are often fruitful.

But at a cost. I often regret that the rewarding book that I stopped reading part-way through in favour of some new pursuit, and that I know would have benefited me, has since been buried lower and lower in the pile, further and further from being picked up again. Some day I will go back, I resolve. And sometimes I do, perhaps years later.

Reading Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (finally -- published in 1952!), makes me now, off-piste, want to read late 18th century verse -- an unusual impulse in our day.

So first when Phoebus met the Cyprian queen,
And favour’d Rhodes beheld their passion crown’d,
Unusual flowers enrich’d the painted green,
And swift spontaneous roses blush’d around.

Websites and blurbs describe Davie as an ultra-conservative critic but his comments on extracts like this are brilliant and make me see them afresh. If this is ultra-conservatisim, let’s have more of it. (I won’t copy it out: it’s at Penguin, 1992, p.31; I think perhaps online as well.) If one wants examples of good ‘close reading’, go to Empson, Leavis and Davie.

That bit is from a poem by Shenstone, who I've never heard of. Nor have I heard of several of the other poets Davie quotes. I imagine Shenstone wrote whole volumes of verse, or one fat volume at least, and that Davie read the lot and that most was boring. With what attentiveness he must have been reading, though, for a passage like this to stand out as, in his words, subtle, remarkable and beautiful! My other problem with reading poetry is that after a few pages I can’t maintain that sort of freshness of response.

Perhaps a small dose every day would be sustainable and I’d get through, say Yeats or Milton, in a few months. It’s not going to happen, though.

Comic artists and English

Foyles had an event with two of the biggest US comics / cartoon / graphic novel artists, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. The theatre it was held in (Cochrane Theatre by Central St Martins School of Art) was full so they clearly have a huge clientele over here -- including son Jim who took me along with his animator mate, Alex Potts.

Chris Ware in particular had things to say about drawing comics that struck me as consistent with my understanding of writing as they it be occurring in school English.

Kids want to draw/write fiction with exotic characters but can’t because they haven’t enough experience. Turn them therefore to their own real lives, and even away from fiction. An account of a gym lesson, according to Ware, could be far more exciting than anything from what we usually think of as imagination (and, I would add, would involve as much real imagination). This is what Harold Rosen and those who thought like him at Walworth School and elsewhere were onto in the mid-fifties, and it’s consistent with the advice and practice of, say, Ted Hughes.

As for process, if I got it right, neither is in favour of sketchbooks and rough versions (for writers that would be notebooks and drafts). For Clowes going out every day to sketch when he was learning to draw was a drag and brought no pleasure; similarly doing his strips in rough to work out the ideas. Both felt the final version lacked energy and drawing it was a chore, so they now go straight to the final paper (they specified the brand, size and gauge!). The experience is 100 per cent pleasure when you don’t know what’s going to happen two pages ahead. In English at certain times the orthodoxy drafts and revision and may still be. James Britton expressed the same objection to it as Clowes and Ware, and emphasised the value of what he called ‘shaping at the point of utterance’ (‘utterance’, obviously, being used to include written ‘speech’.)

Drawing/composition should above all be a process of discovery.

Ignore thoughts of your audience. You know in general the sort of people you’d like to read your stuff; beyond that just make sure it’s intelligible. The transaction is between you, your stuff and your medium, so concentrate on that.

Ignore form, don’t try to develop a distinctive style. Focus on the content and draw/write it whatever way you do.

When I have my own school I'll have these guys in to teach drawing comics (as Jim in fact does now), and I’d get the kids to speculate about the implications for writing.

Hughes' boyhood

From this account of his youth around Mexborough (he attended Mexborough Grammar School) we get, amongst other things, Hughes' feeling for poetry as a sort of magic. And note the learning by heart that he did.

From a long letter answering questions sent by an Oxford MA student writing her dissertation 1992, p.621ff) [click to enlarge]

Ted Hughes' Letters

I had three good English teachers. The rest were awful, as were perhaps half of the teachers at that posh grammar school. One thing the best did was read the latest stuff, bring it in, read bits to us and make sure it was in the library. I remember being introduced by Neville Newhouse and Dr Oxley to Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Iris Murdoch too, I think.

If I was that sort of teacher now – which I'd want to be -- I'd be going to town on Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Faber, 756pp, £30 and worth every penny. For those who mainly associate Hughes with Sylvia Plath’s suicide, you get his side of the story, very convincingly, but for me that was a minor interest. (If you’re teaching Plath you’ll need to read the relevant letters.) If you know and like his poetry there’s a mass of stuff about his writing of it; if you don’t know his poetry, you’ll want to after reading the letters.

The stuff about his wild boyhood is fascinating (these are letters that include long, long chunks of what could have gone into his autobiography): having vast stretches of fields and woods completely to himself and his brother, apart from the farmers who adopted him, round first Mytholmroyd, then Mexborough, shooting, trapping and fishing.

Gerald, Olwen and Ted Hughes, late 1940s

There’s lots about his relationships with wild animals: they stood for anything that was untouched by culture, which he experienced as restrictive; he tackles head-on the fact that he killed so many of them. Hughes comes across as sympathetic and, unexpectedly for me, funny and playful – some letters are hilarious. He’s also strange: serious believer in astrology and Robert Graves’ theories about the Muse (key book, The White Goddess). Terrific stuff about Shakespeare; Hughes knew several plays by heart (and Yeats’ collected poems).

What would I do with the book as an English teacher?

(1) I'd read passages with the whole class and get them to talk about them. (Older groups, that is: Y10 upwards. I might give entire long letters to sixth formers to read for homework. But there are also lovely passages about animals, and fishing, that younger students would enjoy.)

(One particular long letter is that to Anne-Lorraine Bujon, starting p621, an account of his development as a poem. It would go better with students who have read a fair bit of Hughes’s poetry, but even without it’s interesting as a poet describing what he had felt he had to do and why at different stages.)

(2) Copy different chunks and give to groups: read this & prepare a presentation that will get the class talking.

Through what I got them to read I would want to convey a sense of what it’s like to be a poet (or at any rate one sort of poet); what poetry is (one version); and what it’s like to be swept away by literature and poetry as an adolescent. For the more academic students, you can track in the letters the stages of Hughes’ poetic development: when he achieved take-off, when he was stuck, false turnings, sterile periods and re-emergences, his own overall sense of his achievements and failures.

Many adolescents will sympathise with Hughes’ determination not to get a proper job and not to waste his life (as he saw it) performing conventional duties. (In the end he had to waste great tracks of time making a living – teaching, readings etc; other time he saw afterwards as a waste – writing prose, working on dramatic productions, farming.)


Hughes is interesting on the teaching of English. (He had a go in a secondary modern school and found the experience ‘salutary’.) He writes to Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education who introduced the National Curriculum, advocating the practice of memorising poetry and even prose (p546).

Here are a few selections:

University English Departments – the enemies of English

This is a great rant against English academics, 1950s to 1990s, and how they kill any creativity that students bring with them from school -- of which there is plenty, he knows.

The question is: Are university English departments any better now? Has the rot of spurious academicisation and denial of creativity in fact spread downwards, right through the secondary school? Seems to me school is now too often a hostile environment for young people who are seriously drawn to either reading or writing; if they pursue those needs, it's against the grain of English, not with it. Am I right?

Note: Hughes knew all about children's writing from his work as judge of the annual Daily Mirror Children's Writing Competition. Brian Cox wrote the Cox Report on the proposed National Curriculum for English.