It’s Ted Hughes Week

Ted Hughes hated the idea of religion in poetry. He said to include religion was to set limits on its relevance to readers. How universal is a piece of literature if it only appeals to Christians or Mormons? Still, Hughes was fascinated by power that fell beyond the limits of humanness. He called it “the elemental power circuit of the universe,” and he managed to communicate it by inventing his own mythology.

You could say he spoke about god without speaking about god. Here is an example from his poem, The Knight.

… He has conquered in earth’s name
Committing these trophies
To the small madnesss of roots, to the mineral stasis
And to rain.

An unearthly cry goes up.
The Universes squabble over him—

Here a bone, there a rag.
His sacrifice is perfect. He reserves nothing.

Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him,
Earth itself unravels him from beneath—

His submission is flawless.

Blueflies lift off his beauty.

The knight is in a battle with the material world. He wins that battle by surrendering and absorbing into it. In the end:

His spine survives its religion,
The texts moulder.

In Hughes’ world, the human entity survives god. Why? Because he wrote the myth. That’s why.

We have all the themes of any Abrahamic religion in that poem, and yet even I, as an atheist, can find relevance in it. Mythology is a powerful tool for a writer, and Hughes knew that. He wrote entire books of them, from his incredible poetry collection, Crow, to the children’s book, Moon Whales. He created his own worlds because inventions can be bent into any shape you like. Religions cannot.

Mostly, Hughes’ many myths succeed because they are so visceral. Hughes ties them to the earth by describing earthly sensations and tendencies through rocks and blueflies and unravellings. He used to play on primitive life because it appeals to the most primitive parts of our minds.

In inventing religion, Hughs becomes the shaman of his time. He becomes chosen by the spirits.

Anne Sexton used a similar trick. In many ways, she created the mythology of the Fifties housewife. In her world, anything can happen because it is she who invented it. She created the rules, so she had absolute power over them.

Hughes described his poetic goals as creating “a language for the whole mind at its most wakeful.” So he hoped his poems would appeal to every single part of our minds, and I believe he achieved exactly that.

We’ve tried this exercise before, but let’s try it again: Write a poem or short story that creates your own mythology. The catch? That mythology must appeal to universal human experiences.