Jonathan Bate > Quotes

“During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.”
― Jonathan Bate

“1595, Richard Field, fellow-alumnus of the King Edward grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: translated out of Greeke into French by James Amiot, abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings privie counsell, and great Amner of France, and out of French into English, by Thomas North. This was the book that got Shakespeare thinking seriously about politics: monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire. He absorbed classical thought, but was not enslaved to it. Shakespeare was a thinker who always made it new, adapted his source materials, and put his own spin on them. In the case of Plutarch, he feminized the very masculine Roman world. Brutus and Caesar are seen through the prism of their wives, Portia and Calpurnia; Coriolanus through his mother, Volumnia; Mark Antony through his lover, Cleopatra. Roman women were traditionally silent, confined to the domestic sphere. Cleopatra is the very antithesis of such a woman, while Volumnia is given the full force of that supreme Ciceronian skill, a persuasive rhetorical voice.40 Timon of Athens is alone and unhappy precisely because his obsession with money has cut him off from the love of, and for, women (the only females in Timon’s strange play are two prostitutes). Paradoxically, the very masculinity of Plutarch’s version of ancient history stimulated Shakespeare into demonstrating that women are more than the equal of men. Where most thinkers among his contemporaries took the traditional view of female inferiority, he again and again wrote comedies in which the girls are smarter than the boys—Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice—and tragedies in which women exercise forceful authority for good or ill (Tamora, Cleopatra, Volumnia, and Cymbeline’s Queen in his imagined antiquity, but also Queen Margaret in his rendition of the Wars of the Roses).41”
― Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare

“They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’, A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. ‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.37 This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.”
― Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

“dank water. They felt low, despite the presence of Ted’s name carved on a tree as a token of memory. As rain began to fall, Ted made one token cast himself, which he described as ‘a ceremonial farewell’, and there ‘among the rubbish’ he hooked ‘a huge perch’, one of the biggest he had ever caught: ‘It was very weird, a complete dream.’32 Manor Farm is now a gastropub, the Crookhill estate a golf course, the pond of the pike shrunk by mud and reed. The magic landscape survives only in Hughes’s writings.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia had become a feminist icon because nobody before her, no woman before her, Had emptied her whole soul of its rage Against all that had suppressed and denied her, Against all that had shut her from the life She had wanted for herself, from her freedom.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around. The movie people were”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“to be kept of every expense and bill’, general acceptance of his friends, no ‘foolish battles over interior design’ (which was to say, don’t remove every last trace of Sylvia’s taste), 8 a.m. as ‘getting up time, no dressing gown mornings, no sleep during day unless emergency, and by agreement’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“That I should be supplanted (sub-planted!) by others. I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will nor huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“His account of the approach to the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse high in the mountains of Savoy inspired generations of artists and students to head for the wild landscapes of the south: It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine trees hanging over head; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is still made greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld.17 This is a highly influential early usage of the word ‘romantic’ to describe mountain scenery. It is also a classic instance of what Edmund Burke classified as a ‘sublime’ as opposed to a ‘beautiful’ scene, the distinction being that the sublime creates a reaction of awe with an element of fear, in this case created by the raging torrent, the noise resembling thunder, the echo from the mountain walls. For Wordsworth and Jones, as for Gray and Walpole before them, the approach to the Grande Chartreuse was one of the most ‘astonishing’ scenes that they ever beheld. Astonishment – being struck dumb with awe – was the hallmark of the sublime.”
― Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

“At the planning stage, he had suggested to Brook that a female figure should appear in the position of a ‘Sheila-na-gig’, a kind of ancient Irish stone carving of a woman with her knees more or less over her shoulders and her fingers pulling wide ‘a very large cunt’. The Irish name, he explained, meant ‘Woman of the Tits’. The giant phallus could perhaps, he thought, go up into the woman and then be seen on a ‘sort of spider’s web of veins, like the drapery of the placenta’.50”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“of Hughes’s fortitude that he kept cool and saw the funny side.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“The price of art is the destruction of a living tree.”
― Jonathan Bate

“She had always been conscious that her body was not nearly so beautiful as her ravishing face; now she felt that she was losing her looks altogether,”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Ted, who regarded Taylor as the sexiest woman on the planet, was furious.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Didn’t dreams have the same function? And poems? Did poetry grow from neurosis but come to fruition as a form of healing? Could poetic experience be ‘the vital, medical operation’? Was it in some sense ‘the correction of God’?”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“O, you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off,
And bear us like the time.”
― Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age

“classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“who accordingly developed a new kind of poetry of survival which succeeded in yoking the suffering of the mid-century generation to ‘their inner creative transcendence of it’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“The progress of our being’: the baby nursed in its mother’s arms or sleeping on its mother’s breast is blessed because it is learning the experience of sympathy, the force of love. It is through the bond with our mothers in our infancy that we first claim ‘manifest kindred’ with a soul other than our own. As the baby at the breast gazes into the mother’s eye, it has its first experience of feeling. The reciprocal exchange of ‘passion’ is like an ‘awakening breeze’ that in time will extend its force and bind us to our natural surroundings, irradiating and exalting ‘All objects through all intercourse of sense’:”
― Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

“My intent is not to write histories, but only lives. For the noblest deeds do not always show men's virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won wherein are slain ten thousand men, or the great armies, or cities won by siege or assault.”
― Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age

“But we know for sure that the whole course of Ted Hughes’s future life was decided by his flight from Sylvia Plath and Court Green in 1962.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Late in life, he became a supporter of her Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which fostered the arcane spiritual traditions and also won the support of Prince Charles. Hughes”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“One death ‘infects another’, he wrote in his journal account of the terrible day.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“his theory of poetry as ‘the psychological component of the auto-immune system’:”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“His favourite fishing place on the Crookhill estate was a large pond, very deep in places.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“dissociation of sensibility’ fractured English culture and society, and that it was the job of the poet to repair it.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“In his reserved, understated manner, he was making a profound expression of the undying nature of love – of his love and respect and sorrow for the brilliant and tormented poet-wife of his youth. In his words to me, as in the poems he was even then writing, he was seeking a resolution to his own and their children’s loss and grief, some way of coming to terms with his beloved’s abrupt, irreversible departure – from him, from her children, from herself. He seemed to seek no less than a reconciliation across the very boundary between life and death.32”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
― Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare