{"id":7192,"date":"2016-10-19T19:37:11","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T19:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/?p=7192"},"modified":"2016-10-19T19:51:11","modified_gmt":"2016-10-19T19:51:11","slug":"ftf-katherine-robinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/2016\/10\/19\/ftf-katherine-robinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Following the Fellows: Katherine Robinson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Katherine<\/a>

Katherine Robinson<\/p><\/div>\n

I spent a week in the Emory Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library reading Ted Hughes\u2019s notes and drafts for Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow <\/em>and Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama<\/em>.\u00a0 I am researching Hughes\u2019s use of stories from The Mabinogion<\/em>— \u00a0a collection of Welsh myths recorded in the Middle Ages– as substructures for some of the poems in Crow<\/em>, Cave Birds<\/em> and his late collection Howls and Whispers<\/em>. Part of this research appears in my article \u201cThe Remains of Something: Mabinogion <\/em>Myths as Poetic Substructures in Crow <\/em>and Cave Birds<\/em>\u201d which appears in The Ted Hughes Society Journal <\/em>(July, 2016). I am fascinated by how these Welsh myths lurk narratively and imagistically behind some of Hughes\u2019s poems, and I went to Emory hoping to better understand how these substructure were built. Did Hughes write any notes explicitly referring to to his use of these myths? And how did he draft the poems themselves?\u00a0 Did his early drafts recapitulate the myths more closely? Did he write drafts that slowly evolved towards resembling the myths?<\/p>\n

He seems to have done some of both. I was most struck by the difference between the published Cave Birds <\/em>poem titled \u201cThe Plaintiff\u201d and an early draft of the poem strikingly entitled \u201cA Hermaphroditic Ephesian Owl.\u201d In her book Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, <\/em>Ann Skea argues that this poem– and the penultimate poem of the collection, \u201cThe Owl Flower,\u201d echo the Mabinogion <\/em>myth of Blodeuwedd who murders her husband, Llew Llaw Gyffes. A magician initially creates Blodeuwedd out of flowers– meadowsweet, oak and broom. Later, however, she helps her lover to kill her husband, and the same magician curses her and turns her into an owl. The resonances between the title of \u201cThe Owl Flower\u201d and this myth are clear, and the published version of \u201cThe Plaintiff\u201d is also brimming with melded avian and plant imagery.<\/p>\n

The first stanza, for example, contains the line,<\/p>\n

Her feathers are leaves, the leaves tongues. (Ted Hughes, Collected Poems,<\/em> 423.)<\/p>\n

In the early draft I examined at Emory, these lines are absent. In the draft, bird and plant imagery are juxtaposed but not conflated. Hughes writes, for example,<\/p>\n

What is this thing, feathering and ruffling?…<\/p>\n

A bush of wounds. (Ted Hughes papers<\/a>, Box 63, FF 49)<\/p>\n

The title\u2019s reference to the an owl make the poem\u2019s allusion to Blodeuwedd more specific, however, and the owls\u2019 hermaphroditism is fascinating and intriguing. At the very least, this conflation of genders mirrors the conflation of plants and birds in the published poem–categories are blurred, confounded and melded. Learning that the bird Hughes had in mind as he wrote of feathers and leaves was, indeed, an owl heightens the echoes between this poem and the Mabinogion <\/em>tale.<\/p>\n

The ending of the published version of \u201cThe Plaintiff\u201d again combines birds and flowers. The last lines describe how the victim lodges in the protagonist\u2019s chest and describes her as a \u201chumbling weight\u201d which makes breathing difficult. Finally, Hughes describes the victim as<\/p>\n

Your heart\u2019s winged flower come to supplant you.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the earlier draft, again, juxtaposes but does not meld the botanical and avian images:<\/p>\n

And your head is ringing\u2026<\/p>\n

with a cry<\/p>\n

Too rooted for the ear, your blood-fed flower<\/p>\n

Come to supplant you. (Ted Hughes papers<\/a>, Box 63, FF 49)<\/p>\n

\"Hughes'<\/a>

Hughes’ works Cave Birds and Crow.<\/p><\/div>\n

Writing to Ann Skea, Hughes described the complex narrative superstructure of Cave Birds. <\/em>All of the poems work together to create a story about accusation, condemnation, death and–ultimately–transformative rebirth. He called the book \u201can alchemical cave drama\u201d because the protagonist is transformed\u00a0 just as, in alchemy, base metals transmute into gold. Hughes claimed, \u201cThe plot consists of two parallel \u2018stories.\u2019 In the one, the dramatis personae are birds. In the other, a man and a woman. My starting point was the death of Socrates. The crime for which he is judged, and which he expiates\u2026 is\u2026 the murder of the Mediterranean Goddess (as Mother and Bride)\u201d(Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes<\/em>, 491-2) In the book, a male character is tried for the murder of a female victim. The fact that Hughes used The Mabinogion <\/em>tale of Blodeuwedd and her slain husband Llew Llaw Gyffes as a sub<\/em>structure for many of the poems, however, creates an intriguing tension with the collection\u2019s explicit narrative arc. In the book\u2019s mythic substructure, the genders of the attacker and murdered are reversed. Bloduedd is, after all, condemned and cursed for a crime against a male victim. Looking at \u201cThe Plaintiff\u201d in light of this Mabiongion <\/em>tale fascinatingly conflates the plaintiff and the aggressor. (The poem is about the archetypal female victim, but the poem\u2019s imagery evokes Blodeuwedd, who–in the tale–is the aggressor.)<\/p>\n

Comparing the drafts of various poems in Cave Birds, <\/em>including the drafts of \u201cThe Plaintiff,\u201d was like watching an image sharpen as a pair of binoculars slowly focuses. Hughes begins with the rough, explicit image of an owl in the title of \u201cA Hermaphroditic Ephesian Owl.\u201d The image of the owl gradually submerges itself in the poem\u2019s imagery which, in the published version, creates a clear imagistic hybrid of a bird and a plant– an homage to Blodeuwedd\u2019s transformation from flower-woman to owl.<\/p>\n

Hughes was fascinated by both mythology and shamanism. In its simplest form, shamanism is a healing practice found in many cultures around the world. It\u2019s aim is to take a metaphorical journey into the spirit world in order to bring back knowledge or healing. As part of this journey, the shaman often changes shapes and becomes different animals or order to achieve various quests. The myriad transformations in Mabinogion <\/em>myths mirror the shape shifting integral to shamanic practice.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The White Goddess, owned by Ted Hughes<\/p><\/div>\n

Hughes owned a plethora of books about mythology, shamanism and mysticism\u2014 several of which recount key Mabinogion tales. It was a pleasure to spend hours leafing through these books and gaining insight into the broad mythological framework that underlay both Hughes\u2019s poetry itself and his overall thoughts about poetic process. Hughes\u2019s grammar school teacher, John Fisher, gave him a copy of Robert Graves\u2019s The White Goddess <\/em>as an academic prize. Seeing this book was a particular pleasure; Hughes underlined it extensively, and his markings reveal his interest both in particular myths and in overall ideas. He repeatedly marked, for example, passages in which Graves claims that the sacred nature of poetry can be \u201chistorically\u201d traced back to Celtic bardic traditions. Hughes marked several of Graves\u2019s assertions that the bardic tradition was venerated more in Ireland and Wales than in Anglo-Saxon culture. Perhaps these claims helped fuel Hughes\u2019s fascination with Celtic bardic traditions, and perhaps they underlay his interest in using Welsh myths as substructures for poems which grapple with the transformative capacity of poetry.<\/p>\n

In a long note scrawled in a notebook full of drafts for Crow poems, Hughes wrote about his idea that shamanism and poetry are fundamentally connected and that poetry is, at heart, a healing process. Interestingly, several of Hughes\u2019s books including Johns Matthews\u2019s The Celtic Shaman<\/em> equate shamanism with early Welsh bardic traditions.<\/p>\n

In the same notebook, Hughes wrote, \u201cWriting his poetry, every poet produces or tries to produce the thing in poetry that makes him need poetry.\u201d (Ted Hughes papers<\/a>, Box 57, FF 15, Notebook 10).\u00a0 Reading through page after page of scrawled Crow<\/em> drafts was a fascinating glimpse into what kind of poetry Hughes tried to write\u2014and what kind of poetry he needed. His poetry is deeply infused with images of magic and mythology, of shamanism and transformation. His poems chronicle moments when one things turns to another. These transformations offer the possibility of transcending bounds and of finding healing by escaping the seeming immutability of chronological progression.<\/p>\n

Hughes shared a generative collaboration with the American artist Leonard Baskin who illustrated both Crow<\/em> and Cave Birds<\/em>. A flyer for The Complete Works of Leonard Baskin, <\/em>a handsome edition of Baskin\u2019s prints,\u00a0 is tucked into a box of letters between Hughes and Baskin. The flyer quotes Ted Hughes\u2019s description of Baskin’s prints: \u201cThey remind me\u2026 of a primitive hunter\u2019s X-ray drawings of a creature\u2019s essence.\u201d (Ted Hughes papers<\/a>, Box 1, FF 13)\u00a0 Poring over Hughes\u2019s drafts provided an x-ray image of the essence of the poems, a glimpse of the mythic forms and concerns that acted as skeletal structures for the finished drafts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a week in the Emory Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library reading Ted Hughes\u2019s notes and drafts for Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow and Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama.\u00a0 I am researching Hughes\u2019s use of stories from The Mabinogion— \u00a0a collection of Welsh myths recorded Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3517,"featured_media":7201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[430],"tags":[199,431,298,466,164],"class_list":["post-7192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-following-the-fellows","tag-archives","tag-fellows","tag-poetry","tag-research","tag-ted-hughes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/files\/2016\/10\/crow_cavebirds.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3517"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7192"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7207,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7192\/revisions\/7207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}