A poet, lonely as a cloud

Ted HUGHES was an inexorable, outsized presence in poetry on both sides of the Atlantic until his death in 1998, but few readers could have realized until now just how prolific a career it was. His publishers have created a monumental edifice to house his collected verse, a 5-pound brick of a book, one of the largest single volumes of a poet’s work to be issued in recent memory. Like most such compilations, Hughes’ “Collected Poems” reveals unities and contradictions, beauties and flaws that run through his body of work; as is also often true, those qualities were evident from the beginning.

When he was 25, the gawky Yorkshire lad’s American wife, Sylvia Plath, persuaded him to enter a competition sponsored by the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Assn. of New York, the first prize being publication of the winning manuscript. Plath typed his poems for him, and he won. “The Hawk in the Rain,” published in 1957, established Hughes in the proverbial overnight span as a major voice, and none of the many books of verse that followed ever decisively surpassed it.

Hughes’ technical mastery astonished, and his intellectual development was no less impressive: He had obviously read English poetry widely and well, and he was claiming some of its ancient themes as his own. Subjects such as the terrible power of nature, the perils of romantic love and the curse of history (particularly a horror of England) entered his work whole: Passionately felt and uttered with eloquent complexity, they possessed his formidable imagination throughout his career.

Among the themes sounded in “The Hawk in the Rain,” perhaps none would occupy Hughes’ imagination with greater force (albeit covertly) than that expressed in “Famous Poet.” With a young writer’s brassy impudence, Hughes scoffs at the worldly success that would soon come to him: The Famous Poet’s efforts “to concoct / The old heroic bang from their money and praise” have proved, by the end of his life, to be futile. He is wrecked, a monster,

a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete

Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate

From a time when half the world still burned, set

To blink behind bars at the zoo.

The heady, touching implication underlying those lines is that this process of obsolescence and domestication would never afflict Ted Hughes: His half of the world will always burn.

In the mid-1950s, the British scene was dominated by poets who never wanted to create a heroic bang in the first place. Epitomized by Philip Larkin’s high-strung wit, they inhabited a cool, fireproof world of modest ambitions. Sloppy, bearish Hughes was Promethean, aspiring not to fame but to greatness: His models were Yeats and Eliot, magi who performed their verbal miracles in an otherworldly ether. Auden had previously been crowned as their heir, and now Hughes longed to take his place in the apostolic succession.

The influence of all three is clear in Hughes’ early work: Yeats’ cascades of interlacing, symbolic images; the haughty, remorseless nihilism of Eliot’s great poems of the 1920s and 1930s; Auden’s fine, fuming anger, disdaining irony unless it is sarcastic. Something close to Robert Graves’ obsession with anthropology frequently glints through. Yet Hughes never quite attained the pinnacle of moral and literary influence -- the “greatness” -- of his predecessors, primarily because, by the late 20th century, the position occupied by poetry, even in the literary world, was being leveled ever downward.

Hughes was undaunted: No major 20th century English poet was more industrious. The undeniable urgency of his need to create courses through this collection’s pages like electricity, pulling the reader along. In addition to the many volumes of verse published during his lifetime as trade books, Hughes also generated what Paul Keegan, editor of “Collected Poems,” describes in his introduction as a “less familiar penumbra of broadsides, pamphlets and limited editions, published by numerous small presses and imprints during the same decades in which the official canon of his poetry was established.”

Some of the new collection’s most memorable pages shine forth from that penumbra. One treasure is Hughes’ faithful, vigorous translation of the concluding passage of Book V of Homer’s “Odyssey,” which he read on a radio broadcast in 1960 and never published. His translations, particularly of classical poetry, are among his finest works. Yet of his book-length translations, only “Tales From Ovid,” crisply rendered and compulsively readable versions of 24 episodes from the “Metamorphoses,” is included here. One of the collection’s last works is a gritty, vivid translation of a passage from “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the Middle English romance that fascinated him throughout his life.

Hughes may not have sought fame, but a notorious kind of fame found him after Plath’s suicide in 1963. Death transformed her into a transatlantic icon -- and made egotistical, philandering Hughes forever the villain in the public tragedy. The more grievous affront may have been the consensus that was gathering, at first among readers and then among critics, that Plath was the more gifted poet. Her final act had a suffocating effect on Hughes: For three years afterward he published virtually nothing, and after that, according to the received critical wisdom, which is supported by a reading of the “Collected Poems,” his verse became repetitive and diminished in originality.

The publication of “Crow,” in 1970, marks a watershed of a sort: This cycle of grim creation myths and dystopian legends, unified by the threatening specter of the eponymous jokester-bird, surrenders conceptual nuance to dark floods of absolute nihilism. The “Crow” poems have impressive visceral power and are indeed often garnished with spurting blood and spattering guts, but for all their artistry and erudition, the palette of black and blacker is finally almost stupefying, like an evening of heavy-metal rock.

Fame of the most orthodox kind came to Hughes in 1984, when he was made poet laureate of Britain. One might have thought that he would despise the post, but he devoted more energy to writing odes for state occasions than any of his 20th century predecessors (although the post had long ago ceased to have that or any other duty attached to it). He wrote enough of them to fill a book, mockingly titled “Rain-Charm for the Duchy,” with learned footnotes like “The Waste Land.”

A modern writer can hardly be expected to bring the zeal of a Sir Walter Ralegh to the subject of the queen’s birthday: Hughes’ attempts to revive the defunct literary form are ingenious and fascinating, though, inevitably, possessing an air of ludicrousness. It’s amusing to imagine what Queen Elizabeth might have thought about these lines from a masque composed to celebrate her 60th birthday, regardless of their high literary pedigree:

Let the first be a Snowdrop, neck

bowed

Over her modesty --

Her spermy, fattening gland

Cold under the ground.

She links an arm

With a Foxglove, raggily

dressed,

Long-bodied, a rough blood-

braid

Of dark nipples.

It wasn’t until the end of Hughes’ life, when he finally addressed his marriage to Plath and her death, that something like tenderness entered the poet’s idiom. “Birthday Letters,” published in 1997, is a problem book: The 88 poems, many of which were written on the anniversaries of Plath’s birthday, and most addressed to her shade, strike a wide range of emotional states, dominated by aching, overwhelming sadness. A few of them push to the edge of kitsch -- and beyond. One of the finest, bravest poems in the collection, audaciously called “Daffodils,” in homage to “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the Wordsworth poem that is the closest thing in English poetry to the Mona Lisa, strips bare the poet’s soul with a sentimentality that is at once moving, embarrassing and, coming from the author of “Crow,” astonishing. The poem opens:

Remember how we picked the

daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I

remember.

Your daughter came with her

armfuls, eager and happy,

Helping the harvest. She has

forgotten.

Plath’s claque, as it must, dismisses “Birthday Letters” on the grounds that it is self-serving, which it undoubtedly is; other readers have complained that the book savors too much of the Oprah era, that Hughes bares too much celebrity bosom for the collection to be taken seriously as literature. Yet “Birthday Letters” brings an essential balance to the “Collected Poems” by providing the human element that sometimes seems lacking in Hughes’ work, particularly after Plath’s death.

No poet can be read for 1,300 pages without becoming samey; there are long stretches of Hughes that read like a Yorkshire nocturne, a bleak, bracing study in grays. Many poems in the collection are very like other poems there, grim, wise and unnerving in their adamant self-possession. By letting a light shine on his inner life at the end of his career, Hughes finally attained something akin to the greatness he dreamed of. *