Escaping Into Solitude
Escaping into solitude,
avoiding hunters’ need to roam,
I long for the latitude
to find my longitude, my home,
where the goddess who presides
over hearth and in the kitchen
born one week before the Ides,
lets me worship her and richen.
Michiko Kakutani reviews Diane Middlebrooks’ “Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage” (Viking) in The New York Times, October 14,2003:
The portrait that emerges is that of a selfish artist who 'lived for poetry, with single-mindedness of the sort he had long ago discerned in W. B. Yeats, the first poet who ever seized his imagination.' Together, he wrote in a letter quoted in this book, Plath and he found a way to 'sacrifice everything to writing.' Without each other, he contended, he would probably have wandered off to Australia, and she would have become a professor and written books on the side. He told a friend that the marriage had been 'marvelously creative' for him for half a dozen years.
But he found it surprisingly easy to move on then, leaving Plath and their two children, when he 'wanted to be out from under her watchfulness, ' in Ms. Middlebrook's words. Because the marriage was an emotionally fraught and artistically productive relationship, the narrative of 'Her Husband' cannot help but fascinate, providing new tidbits of information and insight to anyone who has followed the melodrama of the poets' relationship and the scholarly deconstruction of their art and their lives.
The problem is that Ms. Middlebrook insists on subjecting Hughes's life to a relentlessly Freudian and often highly speculative reading, not dissimilar to that in her 1991 biography of Anne Sexton. And in placing Hughes on the couch she demonstrates an unfortunate tendency to overemphasize the autobiographical elements in his poems (at the expense of his imaginative transactions) and to gloss his actions and choices with a thick patina of psychological determinism.
She writes that the Hughes poem 'Song' is 'quite evidently a poem about the impact of Sylvia Plath on Ted Hughes, even if it was inspired by another woman and written more than half a dozen years before Hughes met Plath.' And she predicts that 'Hughes's access to poetic inspiration was eventually going to require two specific forms of rebellion against domesticity.' Both 'would be enacted against the women in his life, selfishly and sometimes cruelly': the first being an 'escape into solitude, ' the second being what she calls 'the hunter's freedom to roam, ' a need nourished, she contends, in his childhood, when he would escape his mother's suffocating hold by going out on the moors to hunt with his older brother, Gerald.
Hughes was a devotee of Robert Graves's book 'The White Goddess, ' which held that poetry evolved from masculine rituals of devotion to the Goddess thereby preserving humanity's connection to nature's cycles of birth and destruction. It is Ms. Middlebrook's theory that he found his muse in Sylvia Plath and that he saw their marriage as 'the doing of the White Goddess, ' which he was powerless to resist.
10/14/03
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Related quotes
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
quote by Anne Stevenson
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Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.
Sylvia Plath in The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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Sylvia Plath
I wish I had a sylvia plath
Busted tooth and a smile
And cigarette ashes in her drink
The kind that goes out and then sleeps for a week
The kind that goes out on her
To give me a reason, for well, I dunno
And maybe shed take me to france
Or maybe to spain and shed ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
Shed ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then shed get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe shed give me a bath
How I wish I had a sylvia plath
And she and I would sleep on a boat
And swim in the sea without clothes
With rain falling fast on the sea
While she was swimming away, shed be winking at me
Telling me it would all be okay
Out on the horizon and fading away
And Id swim to the boat and Id laugh
I gotta get me a sylvia plath
And maybe shed take me to france
Or maybe to spain and shed ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
Shed ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then shed get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe shed give me a bath
How I wish I had a sylvia plath
I wish I had a sylvia plath
song performed by by Ryan Adams
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I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.
quote by Martin Scorsese
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Velvety Return
Like a dung beetle you were guarding
the tunnel, I will not let the ball roll away,
a grain of ache in my tooth.Why you had
to go, on cathartic release of mutual trust?
A stone in the heart, ice on the wings,
there will be a terrible crash today.
He died by his own hands, failing to reach
the ceiling of solid pain, trekking across
the memories in deep waters. The born depression
had the bride of moon without flesh, beyond the gaze.
A hand holds the sunlight reaching your eyes.
You may swim with fish in mid stream of death.
* On the death of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath in Alaska on 16th March 09.
poem by Satish Verma
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Eucalyptus
A tree grows in Australia and I heard the leaves that yield strong smelling oil.
My poet friend Jerry.Hughes lives there like a huge tree.
I have a message for you my dear friend.
My wife was informed me two days ago
Our eldest daughter & the family will migrate to Australia soon
For better prospects and they were given a promise
To drag us to the city of Melbourne once they touched the soil.
I wrote to my wife' Hey! My darling pain killer
If it's not a dream at least we can rest in peace in an aboriginal's graveyard as 'True Lovers' under the Eucalyptus tree.
To my poet friend Jerry.Hughes
poem by Nimal Dunuhinga
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Dear Will Shakespeare
Dear Will,
How are things out there?
just thought you'd like to know,
that you're eleventh on the Top Poets list
as of today (though I should mention
that the hittership is 75% from
the New World that you just foresaw
before you 'closed your book'; not
that that's relevant - they speak an
English, isn't that great, which is nearer
to your own sound than the strangled
glottal stops of Cheapside Thames-side these sorry days) ...
So to the list: and so you'll understand
that no offence is meant, etcetera...
top dog today is Sheldon Silverstein -
the sort of oddball who lives down the street
just where the sidewalk ends,
whom your children hang around with all the time -
they loved his poetry when they were kids,
and still love him now they're all grown-up
for what he brought to their childhood - I bet
you wrote some poems like that for your kids
but never got them published? So I know
that though my fellow poets sniff,
you'll grant him - love?
The second is a curious case -
you may know him as Nuftali Basoalto,
we know him now as Pablo Neruda -
and though he wrote in Spanish
(they didn't conquer England but
did rather well on Americ's southern shores)
you'll recognise him even in translation
as a fellow poet, worldwide in his heart...
The third is Maya Angelou - now, no-one
wrote more deeply about women than you did,
and of the human spirit:
so though our fellow poets and critics sniff once more,
she is Woman in Splendour,
Woman as Survivor - so,
remembering your Mistress Quickly and her merry mates,
you'll recognise her instantly for what she is?
majesty - thy name is woman...
The fourth is Langston Hughes - a bit of history here:
the human spirit under great duress,
unvanquished - and if this may oft confine
the poet's wordwide scope, may yet sing loud
the human heart and speak
to generations yet unborn
of spirit tested, hope undimmed
and tears.. and tears...and love.
Emily Dickinson, the fifth - I guess
you may well need to read her twice -
her punctuation's not so - breathless -
as she may seem; neglected in her day,
she speaks out of obscurity to the human heart;
she's earned her place, wouldn't you say?
Robert Frost, the sixth - you may find him
as austere as his wintry and keen-fingered name;
like frost, he touches all the countryside;
secure as Jonson, shall we say, in poetry's ear?
Seventh and ninth - let's put them back together -
frail Sylvia Plath and gaunt Ted Hughes, the star-crossed,
storm-tossed, heart-locked, lovelost lovers -
oh, you who know what passion's spent,
what hearts are wrung, for poetry's salt tears,
admire, despair, their planetary pact
eternal writ among the unrhymed stars...
Which leaves just wild Bukowski, raven Poe
to speak as Marlowe, Webster most of all,
as do your own black tragedies,
of those dark places of the human soul
from which emerges all that's truly clear and bright -
and then yourself...
and there is much to say
of Whitman, Sharpe, Palutsky, Dahl,
all widely read, and following on your heels;
in whom, as you, the heart's as great as this great world itself;
and darkest night smiled on by clearest day;
statistics, poets say, have much, have nothing, yet to answer for -
and so, eternal Will - I wish you God's good day!
poem by Michael Shepherd
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Its Jerry Hughes Day
Yesterday was Tuesday.
Today it's Jerry Hughes Day.
Happy Jerry Hughes Day, One and All.
Celebrate it.
Read his poems.
Read them one and all.
poem by Michael Shepherd
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Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.
quote by Anne Stevenson
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Addict
I damage my lungs
Day after day
Knowing someday
That i'll have to pay
Pay the price
For smoking them up
Carry on
And not giving up
Everyday they get weaker
It gets harder to breathe
But the power of addiction
Just won't recede
I have tried to quit
But there are penalties there too
Giving up...
Just ain't easy to do.
(C) Victoria Hughes August 2005
poem by Victoria Hughes
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A Poets Hope
How we long to reach the shelf
Currently held by the poetic wealth
Shelley, Keates. Byron & Poe
Amongst those names we’d like to go
Love and description
A verbal prescription
Cured by Heaney, McGeogh & Cope
We try so hard & pray & hope.
Rhymes may come & we fear
We can never compete with Shakespeare
Yet with couplet descriptions, we can
Compete with Milligan & Betjeman
What is the magic potion
Leading to the fame of Alex Motion
How do the stanzas of Ted Hughes
Continue to sell and top the news
Suicide cannot be the path
Followed by Dylan & Plath
Whilst Hardy, Frost, Cummins and Kipling
Please the eye and set things rippling
So we continue to goad
The brain to produce an ode
That will sear the page
To last an age
Then gather dust upon the shelf
poem by Keith Oldrey
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The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
quote by Sylvia Plath
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Justice
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
poem by Langston Hughes
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The Old Masters
At night in the dark of silence I hear the voices of the old masters.
I hear Homer reciting his odyssey.
I hear Edgar still screaming nevermore.
Gwendolyn voice echoes we so cool.
While Elizabeth is still counting the ways she loves Robert.
All the while Robert tells Elizabeth how she was his love in a life.
Out of the echoes of the night comes the voice of Shakespeare one of the greatest old masters comparing love to a summer's day,
and as I listen I hear dark but powerful Plath speaks of death.
Now as my eyes grow heavy like a lullaby in the night the voice
of Hughes puts me to sleep with his words of a river.
What did my hands do before they held you?
quote by Sylvia Plath
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Fog on the Hillocks Melts Away
The fog on the hillocks melts away,
it’s another bright sunny day
and people do not really know me
the beings beyond the stars
look down at me and cannot properly
make up their minds
if I am living like a saint, or sinner
or is a little bit of both,
the smell of smoke from the train,
and the nearby black township
is on the air
but the light wind blows it away
and the flowers in the garden
all smile up at me, as if delighted
to have my company
and nothing really threatens,
the heaven is blue above me
and at night the stars sparkle invitingly
are drawing me to a world,
a place in the beyond
where my dear father waits
and everything is clear, lovely and sunny
without pain or regret
and nothing bad besets anyone.
(In Answer to Sylvia Plath/Reference: Sheep in Fog by Sylvia Plath.)
poem by Gert Strydom
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On The Goddess Of Poesy
The Goddess of Poesy the Goddess of Song
To the Universal immortals she surely belong
The poets of the World her praises do sing
The gift of poetry to their souls she does bring.
The poets to write poems Goddess Poesy inspire
And of singing her praises they don't seem to tire
The poetry of sorrow the poetry of joy
The poetry of youth of the young girl and boy.
The poetry of youthfulness and of growing old
Of young women in their prime lovely to behold
The beauty of Nature the birds and the bees
The mammals and fishes of land and of seas.
The Goddess of poets of every gender race and creed
For their inspiration to write in her lives her they need
Of love, life and Nature she inspires poets to write
For the lovers of poetry to read and recite.
poem by Francis Duggan
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Blazin' Love
Sylvia Plath said; 'I will be
the very best me that I
always want to be with you.'
That says it all about love, right?
To be with that someone who makes
one want to be a better person.
A Jack Nicholson character said,
'You make me want to be a better man.'
You made me want to be a better me.
Virginia Woolf said, 'If you do not
tell the truth about yourself
you cannot tell it about other people.'
That goes to the heart of what
I have always said about love;
you have to love yourself,
which inlcudes bein' honest with yourself,
before you can love another.
I like to think, at long last,
that I am honest with myself.
Not sure about the lovin' part.
Plath also said, 'I deserve that, don't I,
some sort of blazing love that I can live with.
Deserve? Well sure everyone deserves
a blazin' love they can live with.
Is that not the highest form
of human achievement;
to find ones blazin' love?
In another context,
a Clint Eastwood character said,
'Deserves got nuthin' to do with it.'
I know I was not your blazin' love.
But you were mine.
And I do not quite know
how to live with that.
poem by MacGregor Tagliaferro
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Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
quote by Sylvia Plath
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And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
quote by Sylvia Plath
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