Ted Hughes Quotes

Even the most misfitting child
Who's chanced upon the library's worth,
Sits with the genius of the Earth
And turns the key to the whole world.
Hear It Again ~ Ted Hughes

Now I wanted to show you such a beach
Would set inside your head another jewel,
And lift you like the gentlest electric shock
Into an altogether other England--
An Avalon for which I had the wavelength,
Deep inside my head a little crystal. ~ Ted Hughes

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?"
The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in. ~ Ted Hughes

The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? ~ Ted Hughes

You are who you choose to be. ~ Ted Hughes

There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?
The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule. ~ Ted Hughes

What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.
As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late. ~ Ted Hughes

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove. ~ Ted Hughes

You said. Or maybe it's ourselves.
This emptiness is sucking something out of us.
Here where there's only death, maybe our life
Is terrifying. Maybe it's the life
In us
Frightening the earth, and frightening us. ~ Ted Hughes

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business. ~ Ted Hughes

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars ... ~ Ted Hughes

Some word - from before this translation ~ Ted Hughes

And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making. ~ Ted Hughes

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses. ~ Ted Hughes

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature. ~ Ted Hughes

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness. ~ Ted Hughes

In a cage of wire-ribs
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.
In the old lady's parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames,
Like a torturer's iron instrument preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:

Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil's brass kitchen, in irons, who had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,
And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat
From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught
By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin,
Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush,
And put in a cage to sing.

The old lady who feeds him seeds
Has a grand-daughter. The girl calls him 'Poor Polly', pokes fun.
'Jolly Mop.' But lies under every full moon,
The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still
Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill
The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,
Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:
Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.

All day he stares at his furnace
With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close.
'Polly. Pretty Poll', she cajoles, and rocks him gently.
She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut.
She strikes the cage in a t ~ Ted Hughes

Where white is black and black is white, I won. ~ Ted Hughes

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. ~ Ted Hughes

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
- from Life After Death ~ Ted Hughes

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. ~ David Mitchell

What happens in the heart, simply happens ~ Ted Hughes

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. ~ Ted Hughes

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. ~ Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

- The Thought Fox ~ Ted Hughes

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It's been protected by the efficient armour, it's never participated in life, it's never been exposed to living and to managing the person's affairs, it's never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it's never properly lived. That's how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced...

And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn't come out of that creature isn't worth having, or it's worth having only as a tool - for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful...

And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line - unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round ~ Ted Hughes

So the self under the eye lies,
Attendant and withdrawn. ~ Ted Hughes

The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it ~ Ted Hughes

In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never

Who begat Crow

Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth ~ Ted Hughes

There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood. ~ Ted Hughes

The difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust. ~ Ted Hughes

He could not stand. It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will –
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention. ~ Ted Hughes

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. ~ Ted Hughes

But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood red. ~ Ted Hughes

Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

Crow laughed.

He bit the Worm, God's only son,
Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
Because O it was painful.

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.

God went on sleeping.

Crow went on laughing.

- A Childish Prank ~ Ted Hughes

The Shell
The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.
You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me. ~ Ted Hughes

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly. ~ Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes has been appointed poet laureate to succeed Sir John Betjeman, which is a bit like appointing a grim young crow to replace a cuddly old teddy bear. ~ Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way. ~ Ted Hughes

And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,/ Peered from the broken mullions/ And was stilled. Or was suddenly aflame/ With the scorch of doubled envy. Only/ Gradually quenched in understanding. ~ Ted Hughes

But the jewel you lost was blue. ~ Ted Hughes

Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see ~ Ted Hughes

That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy. ~ Ted Hughes

Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep. ~ Ted Hughes

And that's how we measure out our real respect for people - by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate - and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you. ~ Ted Hughes

We were where we we had never been in our lives.
Visitors--visiting even ourselves.

The bats were part of the sun's machinery,
Connected to the machinery of the flowers
By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning

Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth.
Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.
A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,
They knew how, and when, to detach themselves
From the love that moves the sun and other stars. ~ Ted Hughes

They only want to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping. ~ Ted Hughes

The sea cries with its meaningless voice,
Treating alike its dead and its living ~ Ted Hughes

The Tender Place

Your temples , where the hair crowded in ,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole .
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation . Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy's leg . How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve· threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later,
Over-exposed, like an X-ray --
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat . And your words ,
Faces reversed from ~ Ted Hughes

Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?" asked the dragon. "It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful. ~ Ted Hughes

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry. ~ Ted Hughes

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of. ~ Ted Hughes

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is. ~ Ted Hughes

You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it. ~ Ted Hughes

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. ~ Sylvia Plath

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. ~ Ted Hughes

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this. ~ Ted Hughes

In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance
In my favour out of every sign. ~ Ted Hughes

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast. ~ Ted Hughes

T.S. Eliot said to me 'There's only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it's in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character. ~ Ted Hughes

I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit.
A mad, execution uniform,Ted Hughes

Poetry The Blue Flannel Suit