Bloomsbury Ted Hughes, Class and Violence (Continuum Literary Studies)

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry, but the impact of Hughes s class background on his work has received little attention. This is the first full length study to take the measure of the importance of class in Hughes. It presents a radically new version of Hughes that challenges the image of Hughes as primarily a nature poet, as well as the image of the Tory Laureate. The controversy over 'natural violence in Hughes s early poems, Hughes s relationship with Seamus Heaney, the Laureateship, and Hughes s revisiting of his relationship with Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters (1998), are reconsidered in terms of Hughes s class background. Drawing on the thinking of cultural theorists such as Slavoj i ek, Terry Eagleton, and Julia Kristeva, the book presents new political readings of familiar Hughes poems, alongside consideration of posthumously collected poems and letters, to reveal a surprising picture of a profoundly class-conscious poet. Review If in recent years we have seen the emergence of the 'other' Sylvia Plath, Paul Bentley has given us the 'other' Ted Hughes. Bentley shows that those labels often associated with Hughes nature poet, poet of violence, Darwinian primitivist have obscured Hughes s deep engagement with history, politics and biography. In a series of meticulous close readings, he reveals an ironist and self-parodist haunted by industrial slavery, colonial oppression, class warfare and parental trauma. Bentley suggests, convincingly, that we have been misreading Hughes all along: that his nature poems do not offer an illusory retreat from history, but rather a dark reflection of history s brutality. Ted Hughes, Class, and Violence is a groundbreaking study of a poet whose verse runs 'deep as England.' --Heather Clark, Marlboro College, USA About the Author Paul Bentley is Reader in English Literature at the University of St. Mark & St. John, Plymouth, UK. He is author of The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion & Beyond (1998) and Scientist of the Strange: The Poetry of Peter Redgrove (2002). He has published widely on modern poetry.