Ted Hughes & Thom Gunn — Poetry is for everyone #15

A match made in Poetry Heaven?

In the meticulously neat pencilled notes sketched at the front of my copy of this book I have written the following:

GUNN —> drawn to ordinary —> human

HUGHES —> drawn to extraordinary —> animals

Lol. This is unmistakably another poetry collection from my painstaking days at high school but another that left so much of an impression that I have kept and treasured my original copy from that time, complete with hundreds of notations and analysis in my own hand taking up most of the blank space on each page.

Underneath this rather sweet but grossly overly simplified assessment are more detailed notes that give me some clues as to why these two poets were paired together for the first time in 1962 by poetry publisher Faber — there is no information or introduction in the book to elaborate on this pairing or the poems selected, though this is a duo that have been inexorably linked since that time.

Examples of a number of other book covers for the Gunn and Hughes collections including the original published by Faber (pictured first).

Before my immediately reaching for a search engine to determine the founding of this union, I have referred to my own notes - I wrote them just prior to the internet having exploded into existence of course - my seventeen year old brain observed patterns in their dual fascination with myth and existentialism. My contemporary self isn’t sure there’s a poet out there who wouldn’t be intrigued by ancient literary works and the meaning of life. They both have a tendency to draw on intense experience, I have written; Gunn finds it in the mundane and conforms to existing poetic structures, Hughes finds it in nature and carved out his own unique verse style. Apparently Hughes can sometimes cast off man as bland and insipid as a result, though he acknowledges heroism in those that have immortalised themselves through extraordinary acts. Gunn observes this in the energy and vitality of humanity. He instead reveres those who embrace opportunity and recognise our abundance of choice as something to be treasured.

It is so odd perceiving these two poets through those seventeen year old’s eyes and returning to this collection now as the same person but feeling emphatically different. Perhaps I was just rehashing something a teacher had said (most likely) the notes certainly don’t read like me, or at least my response to the poems now bears no resemblance to the things about them I can see I have written, for one thing they are too academic in form. I wonder would they too feel the same about their coupling as writers now and the inevitable parallels drawn between their work when lined up next to one another? What strikes me most returning to this particular collection is that they don’t feel like natural bedfellows at all.

So, what can the search engines offer up? Hopefully a little more enlightenment. Faber says they paired them as two of the major 20th century poets whose works together showcased the extraordinary breadth of English poetry at the time — well, I love this. It was a knowing and conscious choice that their works be conjoined expressly because of their unlikely union then, united in their differences. What else? They both curated which of their poems were selected for the collection — wow, so they were in on it. That decries mutual respect and admiration for each other’s work, surely? But were they acquaintances, friends even? The published letters of Ted Hughes and more recently those of Thom Gunn confirm that yes indeed, firm friends — they were openly in awe of each other’s work, they urgently sought out each other’s opinions, they shared in each other’s confidences on the most sensitive of topics.

I own Ted Hughes’ collection of letters but wasn’t previously aware of Gunn’s recently published ones released in 2021 — one sec whilst I pop off to grab a copy of those. I want to sit down and read them side by side immediately, line up their calls and responses, see too how their free writing prose compares — I loved this review in the New York Times of the Gunn collection incidentally which led me to an incredible bit of correspondence between the two which eventually became Hughes’ last and in my opinion seminal work, Birthday Letters.

“I don’t know how you have been able to bear all the posthumous nonsense you have had to take since S.P.’s death. As she got made more and more a symbol of whatever the reader needed, you got made into one too, but of the opposite to what the reader thought he (or more likely she) needed. […] I certainly would encourage you to print whatever you have written about S.P. and that you should add to these pieces anything needed to make the story complete… Even if it is a very short book, less than 100 pages say, it would be published because of the extreme interest of its subject and author. I agree that such a book would be good for the record and also good for your own well-being… I have no doubt that it would be a fine book in itself… and a necessary document.”

Thom Gunn in correspondence to Ted Hughes (S.P. refers to Sylvia Plath to whom Hughes’ was married.)

These two ‘major 20th century poets’ were only 33 and 32 when their combined curation was published but Hughes (the junior) is the far more widely known and celebrated of the two. Perhaps because of his relationship to Sylvia Plath or because Gunn who was gay, left the UK and moved to San Francisco “the queerest city I’ve ever been in” more or less immediately after graduating from Cambridge in 1954, never to return. Either way I can categorically say that they are irrefutably in league with one other, Faber were acutely and accurately well ahead of the curve on singling them out. But for the sake of emphasis, Gunn is a MARVEL and should be on any reading list that Hughes is on too, as well as the ones that he isn’t.

Returning to these two poets with such focused attention in this way has been hugely illuminating. There is an aggressiveness to Hughes’ work that I hadn’t observed before, a darkness, a gruffness. Violence and a flaming temper seem to roar through most of his poems no matter the subject even if it’s just in the cadence, with the exception of an odd few and truthfully it is these few that I favour now though his work is undeniably startling from first to last — the last being Birthday Letters of course, that Gunn encouraged him to write and was released mere months before Hughes’ death.

Gunn’s work is also laced with darkness and melancholy but that seems to come from a place of sadness rather than anger so it sits with me a lot more comfortably these days than some of Hughes’ work. Gunn’s work can also feel wild, free-spirited and celebratory. Honestly, like someone I’d be friends with. Where Hughes’ work feels primal, almost animal, Gunn’s feels affectingly emotionally attuned and deeply human. Perhaps those early observations I made weren’t so naive after all.

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It occurs to me how my own relationship to anger and sadness within myself must have transformed rather dramatically during the past two decades for my response to their work now to be so unrecognisable from what it was before. It makes sense I suppose, that the teenage me revered the raging tortured artist over the sensitive introverted one. I think this singular difference in them as artists, is most pronounced and best articulated in the poems I have selected below, which do not actually come from their collaborative collection but are both centred around relationship.

The Ted Hughes one reflects what a much younger self might associate with love: pain, drama, devastating all-consuming fervour; whereas Thom Gunn’s reflects what I think it might really be: intimacy, quiet, tender familial ease. In that way I think these chosen works capture an essence of both the styles and inner lives of each poet rather vividly.

I hope you enjoy!

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LOVESONG

Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

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THE HUG

Thom Gunn

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Is there one of these poets to which you feel more closely aligned? Had you heard of Thom Gunn? What did reading these poems one after the other make you feel? I’d love to hear from you! <3

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