Fiona’s Reviews > Ted Hughes: A Biography > Status Update

‘Dissociation of sensibility’ is T. S. Eliot on what happened to English poetry around the time of the Civil War. ‘The Shakespearean moment’ is Cambridge-influenced critic Patrick Cruttwell’s phrase for the historical and cultural forces that came to a head in the 1590s making it possible for Marlowe, Shakespeare and Donne to write the greatest poetry ever seen in the English language.

The repression of the Goddess by the forces of radical Protestantism took its distinctively English form in the extirpation of the cult of Mary.
Though the process was temporarily slowed by the cult of Queen Elizabeth as a kind of substitute Mary, the rise of Puritanism amounted to a dragging into court ‘by the young Puritan Jehovah’ of ‘the Queen of Heaven, who was the goddess of Catholicism,

Hughes pulls together several threads: the idea derived from his anthology course at Cambridge that human society has evolved from matriarchy to patriarchy: the narrative he had developed from The White Goddess, in which the fecund female earth goddess is displaced by quarrelsome male sky gods; and his reading via Shakespeare, Milton as well as Graves of the Reformation and its suppression of the cult of the Virgin

Rarely has a volume of modern poetry had such a mixed reception as Crow. Al Alvarez set an authoritative positive tone in a review in The Observer the day before publication. He said the collection marked the end of Hughe’s faith in animals, which is true insofar as the sequence has little to do with the natural history of crows, little similarity with the earlier collections in which each animal poem stood in

First sight, First snapshot
isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the
camera’s glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again.
Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect
American legs
Simply went on up.

The camera will be a key metaphor in Ted’s poems about Sylvia, an image of the gaze that fell upon their relationship. In this first snapshot it is her bright confident American glamour

Robert Grave’s recently published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Pressing it through the lens of Jung, Ted was engrossed. He saw in Graves a mature mirror of his own youthful self. ‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion.’ began Graves. And so it had been for Hughes. Poetry is rooted in magic, the book claims; poets are in touch with a mysterious primeval magical