A Christmas Present from Easter Island

I was a teenage Ted Hughes reader

Thanks for reading Some Flowers Soon. This is a post for paid subscribers, with a free preview; an archive of my posts for free subscribers, Pinks, can be found here: https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/s/pinks

---

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

Ted Hughes was the first poet I criticised. At school in the early Nineties, when I was about 14, we read his poem “Wind” and wrote about it. The resonance and colour of the verse went deep: “The house / Rang like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it”. But for some reason in my exercise-book analysis I said that I thought the metaphor of the hills as a tent that “drummed and strained its guyrope” was “a bit obvious”. My teacher commented in red pen that you weren’t really supposed to say things like that. But it was too late: the path of my life was set.

---

My English teacher’s enthusiasm for Hughes — who was then Poet Laureate — became mine. But he was also the first poet I realised could be fallible. Soon, I was haunting the poetry section of the public library, where they had Hughes’ recent book, the disappointingly uneven Flowers and Insects (1986). It’s a thin volume, lavishly padded with watercolours, which contains some great lines (“The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs”) and some terrible ones (a poppy is a “Hot-eyed Mafia Queen!”). I simply didn’t know what to make at all of the long piece in free verse about watching spiders mating through a magnifying glass: “She […] brought monkey-fingers from under her crab-nippers / And grasped his nipple cock”. Was this what my teacher meant when she murmured something about not being so keen on his recent work?

---

Browsing in the library another time, I found a strange, humorous poem by Ian McMillan — who was not then a household name to BBC radio listeners — called “Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley”. Having become aware of the seedy world of newspapers at a time when “Elvis Lives” stories regularly appeared on the front page of the Sunday Sport (and never being sure if these were in any way “true”), I was faintly disturbed by the extended comparison:

At my poetry readings I sneer and rock my hips
I stride the moors
in a white satin jump suit,
bloated as the full moon.

It would still be several years until I realised that Hughes had a reputation as a sex symbol, when a friend at university casually admired a picture of him smouldering greyly on the front of Waterstone’s magazine. But I knew Hughes was still alive, even if Elvis wasn’t. What if he read the poem? Would he think it was rude?