This article has been withheld pending an application for permission to quote from Hughes' poetry. We hope that this suspension will be temporary. Please check these pages again soon.

This article has been withheld pending an application for permission to quote from Hughes' poetry. We hope that this suspension will be temporary. Please check these pages again soon.

This article has been withheld pending an application for permission to quote from Hughes' poetry. We hope that this suspension will be temporary. Please check these pages again soon.

This article has been withheld pending an application for permission to quote from Hughes' poetry. We hope that this suspension will be temporary. Please check these pages again soon.

Ted Hughes began to write while still a student, and like many student poets he had his work included in short-lived publications. One of these - Saint Botolph's Review (1956), edited by David Ross and Daniel Weissbort - has special importance. Adam Crothers has written a short introduction explaining its significance. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we cannot include images of the poems themselves, but we can include the cover and the contents page, to give you some flavour of what one surviving copy of the review looks like now. We have also included a much more recent student poetry publication, the Dial. The relationship between studying literature and writing it is not a straightforward one, but most of the Cambridge Authors, like many current students, made significant creative steps while at University.

St Botolph's Review

Although he wrote poems as an undergraduate, and published a number of them both pseudonymously and under his own name, the most important of Ted Hughes's publications in Cambridge came about after he had graduated. Hughes's friend Lucas Myers spent some time living at the rectory of Saint Botolph's Church, and the magazine that they and a few companions launched on 26th February 1956 bore the name Saint Botolph's Review. It was at the launch party that Hughes and Sylvia Plath met, although in an important sense they had met already: her poems had already appeared in a number of Cambridge publications, and she was familiar enough with her advance copy of Saint Botolph's to quote Hughes's own verse at him that night as they danced.

The second issue of the magazine, still under the editorship of David Ross, appeared in 2006. It contained work by some of the original contributors, including an introduction written by Hughes decades earlier to the poems of the late Susan Alliston, his London neighbour (mentioned in the Birthday Letters poem '18 Rugby Street'). Ignoring the chain of events the magazine would ignite in the lives of Hughes and Plath, it remains impressive that a magazine whose second issue took fifty years to appear, and whose first issue's contributors were then admired only within their social circles, should be thought of as something other than a mere curiosity. It helps that Hughes was not the only one who went on to success as a writer: Lucas Myers and Daniel Weissbort, in particular, are well known for poetry and prose writing.

The subsequent success of poets who published work when at Cambridge inevitably leads one to think of any new student publication as the home of at least one 'next big thing', or whatever the equivalent in the poetry world might be. But it is important also to remember that no writer has the benefit of hindsight when embarking upon her or his career: one can, and should, admire potential, and praise the poem as an indication of what the poet might one day be, but some admiration must also be given to the poem as it stands. In other words, while there is room to consider Hughes's early work as a preface to his more acclaimed poetry, it would be wrong to deny this early writing the acclaim that it earns for itself.

St Botolph's Review

By clicking below you can see the front and back covers, and the contents page, of St Botolph's Review, along with a selection of pages. The copy we used is in Girton College Library, and is reproduced with Girton's permission. The photographs were taken by members of the Scriptorium project - for more details see the Acknowledgements page. We are grateful for the help given by David Ross and Daniel Weissbort themselves as we prepared this page.

St Botolph's Review: Cover

St Botolph's Review: Contents

St Botolph's Review: page 4

St Botolph's Review: page 14

St Botolph's Review: page 15

For another St Botolph experience, watch the first few minutes of the movie Sylvia (2003), starring Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow. (It probably isn't supposed to be on Youtube, but at the time of writing, it is.) You'll see the Review, Sylvia reading it, and their first meeting.

The Dial

One of the most interesting things about the first issue of St Botolph's Review is the way in which this material book, of limited circulation, passed from and through the hands of other key friends and writers in Hughes' circle -- not only the friends who first published and read him, but Sylvia Plath, whose life and writings were to be so closely associated with Hughes' own. Student literary magazines, like the universities in which they are conceived, written, and consumed, are in part defined by their social and communal dynamics. Encountering literary writing in this format emphasises its social character in a way that the single-author collection, or the course-based syllabus in which many people read poetry, does not. Many famous and canonical English writers had their start, like Hughes, in university writing communities: the Elizabethan poets Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, for example, both began writing among friends while studying at Cambridge, John Donne circulated his lyrics and satires in the Inns of Court in London, and Tennyson (as Emma Leadbetter shows in an article for Cambridge Authors) used his university years to improve his writing within the comfort of a tight circle of like-minded (and talented) friends.

This sociality of literary writing persists in modern universities, of course. Much of the best (or most successful, or most capitalised) English literary art of the next century, like that of the past century, will be birthed and fledged in university writing communities across the world. Cambridge continues to play its part in this lively play of ideas, voices, experiments, and ephemera. As a way of witnessing and thinking about this sociality of literary endeavour in action, consider the recent revival of another Cambridge literary magazine, the Queens'-based Dial. This publication brings together the literary and design efforts of a loose group of friends and acquaintances, whose writings rub shoulders with one another here, for the first time -- but may well go on to other contexts and formats. As you browse the pages below, consider some of the conditions and pressures that affect literary writing in this environment: the novelty of exposure for new writers, the advantages and disadvantages of anonymity (or obscurity), the difficulties and opportunities of being read in a context where readers may know you as well as your words, and so on. When you've finished browsing or reading from the Dial, try thinking further about some of these issues with the questions at the bottom of the page.

The Dial: Lent 2009

[high-resolution file]

Further Thinking

Circulation of poetry or other writing within a writing community can easily lead to immediate personal or social outcomes for the writer; Ted Hughes, for example, earned the interest (perhaps the admiration) of a woman he would shortly marry. Does (or can) this change the nature of the writing itself? Ought we to think differently about poetry or prose written 'for' a select and intimate audience, compared to writing produced for a public audience, or even for posterity? What about writers who write for no audience at all? ('Found' poetry?)

One of the interesting things about leafing through an old magazine like St Botolph's Review is the experience of confronting the poetry of an acknowledged literary celebrity -- here, Ted Hughes -- in a publication produced before that celebrity was acquired. It may be impossible fully to discern the quality of a poem behind the celebrity (or in some cases infamy) attaching to a celebrated writer like Hughes, but this experience provokes us to try. Do you find yourself unsettled by this process? How many of your own preferences and critical judgments are informed by convention (or resistance to convention), by the influence of others' opinions, or by the conditions created by publishers, bookshops, and/or libraries?

Although other writers in Cambridge Authors have been heralded, hyped, and given prizes, none of them has undergone this in a media culture that is so familiar to us. Zadie Smith has been the focus of attention from publicity machines, journalists, fellow writers, and prize committees. This is part of the context in which we read White Teeth, and here Frances Winfield presents some aspects of this phenomenon. The point here is to outline the parts of the process by which the profile of the novel was raised, and also to prompt reflection - there are some questions at the end - about how, as readers, we should (or shouldn't) take account of such things.

Initial Reception

In 1997 rumours started flying about a novelist called Zadie Smith. The majority of first-time authors struggle for fame and financial reward, yet she was paid an advance of a quarter of a million pounds for the opening pages of her first novel, White Teeth. The large amount of money involved and the promise of a brilliant new writer naturally fascinated many journalists and critics. Their interest in Smith began at this point and has scarcely diminished since. The journalists' initial reception of Smith and her work was mostly very positive, focusing upon her evident literary ability, creativity, and humour, whilst also commenting upon her youth and mixed-race background. White Teeth was considered an example of the voice of modern, multicultural Britain, and its literary merit was quickly recognized by the public, as demonstrated by its widespread popularity as a bestseller and a book group staple.

Critical Reception

With the advantages of talent and immediate acclaim on Smith's side, all that seemed to be wanting was the approbation of a fellow renowned author, and this was supplied by Salman Rushdie's famous praise which smoothed White Teeth's path to widespread critical recognition. He was quoted on the book's back cover as saying that the novel was 'astonishingly assured', and that he was 'delighted' by it. Receiving such approval from a Booker prize winner helped to ensure serious critical discussion of this new author's work. Critics have noted that one of White Teeth's most impressive qualities is that its prose flows with the confidence and maturity of an older and more experienced writer than Smith, who was only 21 and had just graduated from Cambridge when she was given the advance for the manuscript. In this respect she outstripped Rushdie, and many other established writers, whose works were not written and published until they were considerably older.

Popular and Journalistic Reception

Thanks to Zadie Smith's talent and youth, at the time of White Teeth's publication newspaper editors often wrote about her as one of the bright young things of contemporary writing. The timing of the publication of White Teeth in January 2000 coincided with this viewpoint, allowing journalists like Stephanie Merritt of The Observer to comment that Smith was 'the first publishing sensation of the millennium'. Much of the media interest surrounding White Teeth, heralding a new voice of British creative writing, echoed and also, to some extent, influenced the popular reception of the book. Nonetheless, White Teeth's continued and long-term critical acclaim and popularity is rooted in Zadie Smith's literary skill; critics and readers have applauded the book's wit, humanity, and realism.

White Teeth is profoundly multicultural and representative of the Britain, and more specifically, the London shaped by generations of immigrants. It has attracted many urban readers, including David Sexton, Literary Editor of the capital's Evening Standard newspaper. In a review he fêted White Teeth as 'the novel most alive to the racial mêlée that is London now'. Smith grew up in the multi-ethnic suburb Willesden Green, where the novel is set, and she depicts it with an authentic and engaging atmosphere. Some journalists have remarked upon Smith's own mixed-race heritage in connection with this aspect of White Teeth: the Observer's headline of its review of the book upon its publication was that Smith was 'young, black, British'. Media attention like this may have aided early sales of the book by drawing particular groups of readers towards White Teeth, and by turning Smith into a household name, but White Teeth's critical and popular success is undoubtedly due to the great merit of the book itself and, consequently, word-of-mouth approval. This is exemplified by the praise of Zadie Smith's literary abilities from Andrew Motion, the poet laureate - usually considered a conventional or 'establishment' post in the literary world. He said that the range of novels and poetry studied at school should be extended and 'revitalised' by the inclusion on the curriculum of writers such as Smith. Furthermore, the success of Smith's second and third novels, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, has shown beyond doubt that White Teeth was certainly no one-hit-wonder.

Literary Prizes

Zadie Smith was not a conventional figure in the literary world when White Teeth was first published, as the extraordinary advance she was given shows. The book's commercial success was mirrored by its literary success, as she received many eminent prizes for her first novel. Smith became the recipient of awards ranging from the Guardian First Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, to those such as the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, to the esteemed Whitbread First Novel Award. Although White Teeth did not win the Orange Prize for Fiction when it was shortlisted in 2000, Smith's third novel On Beauty beat fellow celebrated authors Ali Smith and Sarah Waters to gain it in 2006. Zadie Smith has, however, expressed concern about literary awards, claiming on the arts forum website of the Willesden Herald in February 2008 that they are 'only nominally' about literature and more about corporate brand consolidation. This comment caused a flurry of interest and some controversy; there have even been doubts that she really wrote it, though there has been no denial. One thing it does demonstrate is the uneasy relationship that can exist between literature and literary prizes.

Sources

• http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/smith-zadie
• Stephanie Merritt, The Observer, January 16, 2000, www.theguardian.co.uk
• David Sexton, January 22, 2001, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-907133-details/White+Teeth/article.do
• Richard Brooks, The Sunday Times, March 19, 2006, www.timesonline.co.uk
• Jack Malvern, The Times, June 7, 2006, www.timesonline.co.uk
• Nicole Martin, The Telegraph, February 11, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk

Further Reading

• Claire Squires, Zadie Smith's White Teeth: A Reader's Guide (New York and London, 2002).
• Tracey L. Walters, ed., Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (New York and Oxford, 2008).

Further Thinking

Winning a literary prize might seem like a good thing and a worthwhile recommendation: a group of experienced readers has endorsed a book. On the other hand, we may prefer literature to resist consensus, and to cause offence to the establishment rather than seeking its approval. What difference does a literary prize make to your assessment of a work before, during, and/or after reading it?

Much of the excitement surrounding White Teeth seems to have happened with absolutely no prompting from the author or her novel. The media machine, and its relationship with the publishing industry, can make their own momentum. However, do you think White Teeth does actually show qualities that might make it liable to that kind of sensational treatment?

A lot of the critical reception of the novel in the press emphasized that White Teeth is the first novel by a young author. Zadie Smith herself describes it in those terms in the interview she gave to the Cambridge Authors project. As you read the novel, do the concepts of 'firstness' and 'youth' seem useful ones to help you understand the novel?

It doesn't take long to find a reference to music in The Temple - only four lines of poetry, in fact, before Herbert mentions singing in his 'Dedication'. Elsewhere Herbert writes of trumpets and lutes, choirs and consorts, psalms and anthems. Musical imagery in poetry of this period is not, of course, uncommon; but the sheer quantity of references to music in The Temple seems especially noteworthy. This short essay by graduate student Simon Jackson explores how an understanding of Herbert as musician can enrich our readings of The Temple.

Herbert the Musician

Izaac Walton, Herbert's seventeenth century biographer, records that the poet's love of music flourished throughout his life. He records:

His chiefest recreation was Musick, in which heavenly Art he was a most excellent Master, and, compos'd many divine Hymns and Anthems, which he set and sung to his Lute or Viol. (Walton, The Life of Mr George Herbert (1670), pp. 59-60)

According to Walton, Herbert would attend choral services at Salisbury Cathedral; and before returning to his parish in Bemerton, 'he would usually sing and play his part, at an appointed private  Musick meeting'  - even occasionally missing services in his parish to indulge his hobby. (Walton, p. 60)

Herbert's interest in music seems to have been fostered from a young age. In one of his Latin poems, Memoriae Matris Sacrum ('In Sacred Memory of My Mother', Magdalen Herbert), Herbert remembered how there was always music in the family home (Memoriae II, 'Corneliae sanctae', ll.42-44). Two of the most famous musicians of the day, the composers William Byrd and John Bull, dined at the family home in London. Music in the Herbert household wasn't simply reserved for after-dinner entertainment, and often coincided with more 'virtuous' concerns. George's oldest brother Edward taught himself to sing and play the lute at university, 'that I might entertaine my selfe...and that I might not neede the company of younge men in whome I obserued in those tymes much ill example and deboist [debauchery].' (The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Shuttleworth, pp.16-17). More piously still, John Donne, preaching at Magdalen Herbert's funeral in 1627, recalled how the family ended each sabbath 'with a generall, with a cheerfull singing of Psalmes'. (Donne, 'Funeral Sermon on Magdalen Herbert, Lady Danvers', 1627)

Walton records that music played as important a part in the poet's death as it did in his life. The biographer never met Herbert, and his account - which seems intent on representing the poet as a contemporary saint - needs to be approached with a certain amount of caution. Nevertheless, regardless of whether the anecdote is drawn from Herbert's life or from a reading of his poetry, Walton's deathbed scene provides an appropriate end for the musician-poet-priest:

The Sunday before his death, he rose Suddenly from his Bed or Couch, call'd for one of his Instruments, took it into hand, and said -

 My God, my God,
 My Musick shall find thee,
 and every string
 Shall have his attribute to sing.

And having tun'd it, he play'd and sung:

 The Sundayes of Mans life,
 Thredded together on times string,
 Make Bracelets, to adorn the Wife
 Of the eternal glorious King:
 On Sundays, Heavens dore stands ope;
 Blessings are plentiful and rife,
 More plentiful than hope.

Thus he sung on Earth such Hymns and Anthems, as the Angels and he, and Mr. Farrer, now sing in Heaven. (Walton, p. 77)

Music in The Temple

So Herbert's life seems to back up our original impression that music was important to the poet. But where does that leave us? We can read The Temple with a new alertness, perhaps, pricking up our ears and noting with relish each new musical pun; but that will only get us so far and seems a rather soulless, I-Spy approach to such richly suggestive poetry. Instead, the rest of this essay will be interested in the ways in which Herbert employed musical ideas and motifs to explore many of the key themes of The Temple; and thus also interested in how recognising and understanding Herbert's use of music can enrich our readings of his verse.

Why does Herbert introduce music into his Temple? To answer this question, we could draw attention to the ways in which poetry and music are both concerned with communication, or even communion.  One of the most famous hymn settings of a Herbert poem is 'Let all the world in every corner sing', recorded for the Cambridge Authors project by the choir of Queens' College, Cambridge; try listening to this recording, and think about the ways in which the poem tries to collapse the immense distance between God and man: 'The heav'ns are not too high...The earth is not too low'.

let-all-the-world

When listening to the recording, think about the choir's decision to change from four-part harmony to unison singing for the second verse. If we get everyone together from all the corners of the earth, Herbert argues, if we shout and sing our psalms loudly enough, we stand a good chance of being heard. It is unsurprising that the poem has become a popular hymn, uniting one person with another, and human with divine. ('Let all the world in every corner sing' is number 3 on the 'Musical Settings' page. When you're done with the recording, close the window or tab and read on.)

A similar effect is achieved in Herbert's translation of 'The 23d Psalme'. At first glance, this poem may seem to have little to do with music. But remember that this is a psalm, and that The Temple as a whole has been compared to the songs of David, found in the Biblical book of Psalms. Considering Herbert's metrical inventiveness, this poem may seem distinctly unremarkable, written in a form the hymn books call 'Common Metre'. Since the  sixteenth century, this verse form has been popular with hundreds of psalm translators and hymn writers. At one time, though, the form was associated with secular ballad singing. Hymn writers borrowed these popular tunes, hoping to encourage the popular singing of sacred songs. The ghost of a popular, familiar and perhaps secular melody lies behind the Common Metre of 'The God of love my shepherd is' - an echo of Herbert's passion for 'Musick-meetings' and household psalm-singing on a Sunday, and entirely appropriate to a translation of one of the most comforting of psalms.

Indeed, converting the secular into the sacred seems to have been one of Herbert's main motivations for writing poetry. 'Jordan (I)' challenges the conventional wisdom that all poetry should be interested solely in the passions of worldly lovers: 'Who says that fictions only and false hair/Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?' (ll.1-2). One way in which Herbert attempted this was to write new words to existing music - a practice known as 'contrafaction' or 'parody'. Herbert's poem 'A Parody', then, does not suggest subversion and mockery (as the modern usage of the word might suggest); instead, it draws attention to its secular origins as a song written by Herbert's relative William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. Simply glancing at the two poems demonstrates their similarities:

 Soul's joy, now I am gone,
 And you alone,
 (Which cannot be,
Since I must leave myself with thee,
 And carry thee with me).... [Pembroke, 'Song', ll.1-5]

 Soul's joy, when thou art gone,
 And I alone,
 Which cannot be,
Because thou dost abide with me,
 And I depend on thee.... [George Herbert, 'A Parody', ll.1-5]

Far from mockery, Herbert's exploration of God's presence-in-absence is reinforced by our sense of the presence-in-absence of Pembroke's song: 'Because thou dost abide with me,/And I depend on thee'.

Herbert's description of 'Church Music' as 'Sweetest of sweets' may initially seem sweeping. But the more we read of The Temple, the more aware we become of the ways in which Herbert used music in his poetry, and the more we realise how deep Herbert's understanding of the art is. Herbert's music isn't, for instance, a concordant, perfect harmony - music that would, in other words, be intensely boring to listen to. Instead, it includes discords, clashes and suspensions, all waiting to be resolved; as a lutenist and viol-player he understands that to tune a stringed instrument, the string must be put under pressure, pulled taut and stretched. All these ideas come together in the central section of one of Herbert's most popular poems: the discord of the crucifixion, like the tuning of an orchestra, is understood as a necessary prelude to the jubilant song of praise of 'Easter':

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
 With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
 Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day. ['Easter', ll.7-12]

Musical Settings of The Temple

Although Walton suggested that Herbert sang his own poems, unfortunately no settings from his lifetime still exist. However, after the posthumous publication of The Temple in 1633, musicians were soon drawn to set his short lyrics. We still have a number of seventeenth-century settings of some of Herbert's verse, by John Jenkins, John Wilson, and Henry Purcell. Many of Herbert's poems became popular as hymns, which are still sung regularly in churches today - have a listen to the recordings on this website of 'King of glory, King of Peace', 'Teach me my God and King', 'The God of love my shepherd is', and 'Let all the world in every corner sing'. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers are still drawn to Herbert's verse, and it is well-worth exploring this wide repertoire. Perhaps the most famous settings are Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'Five Mystical Songs' (one of which, 'The Call', is recorded here), which have been popular since their first performance in 1911. Composers are still responding to The Temple, and in 2003, the contemporary Scottish composer James MacMillan set Herbert's short poem 'To my successor' for the enthronement of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Further Reading

Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London, 1954). Summers' book includes an informative chapter discussing Herbert's interest in music

Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and music in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1997). Aware of the musical background to poetry of the period, McColley provides a reading of three major seventeenth-century poets - Donne, Herbert and Milton - in terms of the great choral tradition of the period.

John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, 1961). This is an interesting account of the relationship between poetry and music between 1500 and 1700. It includes a substantial section on Herbert's verse.

David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music: An Arden Critical Companion (London, 2006); and Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres (London, 1993, repr. 2006). Herbert's verse was informed by Classical ideas about music. These two books offer interesting, readable introductions to the subject.

Further Thinking

Simon Jackson suggests that music and poetry are not simply analogous arts, but for Herbert were virtually one and the same. In your reading of poems from The Temple, how do you think Herbert achieves the dissonant, concordant, rhythmic, tonal, and dynamic effects of which Simon speaks here?

The musical emphasis that Simon Jackson describes in Herbert's poetry tends to shift his poems toward voice and performance, and away from the solitude of a single reader's encounter with words on a page. How do you square this emphasis on 'communication' or 'communion' with the decidedly personal, even intimate nature of Herbert's poetry?

The Cambridge Authors Herbert pages include settings of Herbert's music, as well as readings of some of his prose writing. Try reading some of this poetry or prose, and then listening to it sung or spoken. How are these experiences different, if at all? Does music tend to foreground aspects of the poetry other than its semantic meaning? Do you think the composers responsible for the music have understood, sympathised with, or challenged the sense of Herbert's poems? How and why? (Click here for the music, and here for the prose.)

In an iconic incident commemorated in the film 'Sylvia', Sylvia Plath was able to recite parts of Ted Hughes's poems when she first met him. Memorization and reading aloud have always been vital parts of the experience of poetry, but they may at present be as neglected as they have ever been. On this page graduate student Adam Crothers and the Cambridge Authors team have put together what we hope might be some thought-provoking suggestions and quotations, relating to Hughes, and then Plath. Memorizing and reciting poetry enhances our experience of it, and may make us think differently about it; and it's good practice for both memory and voice.

I. Hughes: By Heart

Hughes was a great advocate of memorisation and reading aloud. Here graduate student Adam Crothers introduces some of his key words on the topic.

In a letter to his sister, Olwyn, written in 1952 during his first year at Cambridge, Ted Hughes writes of a conversation with his tutor, the Classicist Anthony Camps, about the English Tripos. They agreed that the syllabus was too wide, and led to 'opinions about literature', rather than 'a real knowledge':

I aired my belief - the old bards used to have to learn huge set tomes and become so intimate with them, that they became part of their mind. And just as one thinks with adopted ideas, so, if one studied say, just Shakespeare for 3 years intensely, it would be thereafter your mind, and an anchor for all other reading or art. (Letters, p. 15)

This idea - that intimate knowledge, repeated reading, and memorization, led to something very substantial - stayed with Hughes throughout his life. In 1988 it prompted him to write the following to Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education:

What kids need, say I, is a headfull of songs that are not songs but blocks of achieved & exemplary language. When they know by heart fifteen pages of Robert Frost, a page of Swift's Modest Proposal, Animula etc etc, they have the guardian angel installed behind the tongue. They have reefs, for the life of language to build and breed around.  A 'globe of precepts' and a great sheet anchor in the maelstrom of linguistic turbulence - (now we're really at sea!). (Letters, p. 546)

This is Hughes proposing the memorising of poetry not as busywork, and not as exam preparation, but as a grounding in the better uses of the oft-abused English language, a way of preserving a link to that language's power. Having laid some groundwork in the anthologies The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, edited in collaboration with the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Hughes put together an anthology of poems-for-remembering that was published in 1997 as By Heart.

A key component in the experience of poetry, both as poet and as reader, is reading aloud, as Hughes advises in a letter to Plath:

Beethoven composed singing and roaring and walking very fast and so did Dostoevsky - not singing but vociferating. So read aloud a lot, and read aloud poetry as you walk to and fro in your room timing the metre to your steps. This would be ideal, but you'll think it too ridiculous. (Letters, p. 51)

Whether or not this is good advice, it seems that speaking a poem aloud was an important part of Hughes's compositional process: for this reason if no other, it is worth paying close attention to the actual, heard sound, as opposed to the imagined, seen sound, of his poems. This may be helpful in anchoring one's mind in Hughes's own 'achieved & exemplary language', even if the process might end up emphasising that some of the poem's powers are greater when being read than when being remembered.

One might consider one of two stanzas from the poem 'Shells':

Shells white, shells brown, sea-shells
[...]
Or, cast bare, gleam dry. (You can find the whole stanza in Birthday Letters or in Collected Poems, p. 55)

Listen to the repetitions in this poem: of words, like 'shells', but also of sounds. The 'm' of 'Tumbled' is picked up by 'Swarm', 'foam' and 'gleam', a hum of oceanic ambiance running through the background of the poem. Perfect rhymes, like 'cry' rhyming with 'dry', mingle with half rhymes (shells / shoals / hauls, and the echo of the final syllable of 'curiosity' with the perfect rhymes). The word 'screech' picks up on the 's' sound while distorting the 'sh', the screech of the shells fitting in with a sound pattern yet also deviating from it. In poetry, the sound of the word and the word's meaning are not separate things, and a pattern of sounds helps the reader to experience the poem and to remember details of that experience.

'Shells' sounds beautiful, but ugly sounds can also be memorable, and thus beautiful in their own way. The poem 'Lineage' begins thus:

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

And so on. Rhyme does not help the reader to remember the list of begettings; and rhythmically the unpunctuated lines simply repeat the same structure, by a rhetorical figure called anaphora. The poem eventually breaks away from this mould, but this still would convince nobody that a memorable pattern of sound had been established. Are not these words - Scream, Blood, Eye, and so on - interchangeable? Perhaps, and yet their order is their order, and the reader is expected to respect this. This might seem frustrating, as if the poem is trying to get away with something. But by reading the poem aloud, by reminding oneself that this is a coherent audio-visual experience rather than a typed list, one might become more alert to the mnemonic possibilities of 'Lineage'. 'Who begat' becomes a drone (not unlike the murmuring 'm' already detected in 'Shells') against which the names of the begotten are clear and bright notes, as might emerge from that capitalised, anthropomorphised 'Guitar'. This apparently ugly and ramshackle composition creates the sonic context against which it plays its music. Once the reader becomes accustomed to inviting this process, giving the poem the opportunity to make itself heard, 'Lineage' and other such texts show that while regular rhyme and metre can make a poem powerful and memorable, there remain other techniques: poets like Hughes master as many as they can, and combine them with great subtlety and skill. Reading poems aloud, and memorising some poems or even handfuls of lines, is a way of sensitising the mind to these different techniques, enhancing the experience of reading and writing poetry, installing that 'guardian angel' to watch over one's encounters with literature and with language.

Further Reading

Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber, 2007)

The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 2003).

Further Thinking

1. Adam Crothers suggests 'Shells' and 'Lineage' as two Hughes poems with very different mnemonic characteristics, and different effects when reading aloud. Give them a try - and tell us your findings.

2. Then, of course, you could find other things to memorise and recite. You could try a speech from a Shakespeare play, alongside a Shakespeare sonnet. What differences between them emerge in the process?

II. Plath: 'Daddy' in Different Voices

The wonders of Youtube mean that you can hear Hughes and Plath reading their own poetry. What predictable and less predictable qualities do you observe?

Sylvia Plath's voice, reading 'Daddy' or 'Lady Lazarus', is particularly striking. This is partly because of the poet's life-story: her death overhangs the poems, and her voice seems like a voice from the dead. (Amazingly, you can find Tennyson's voice on Youtube as well. The faint recording (from 1890) has a deathly quality, but there isn't quite the same chill as there is with Plath.)

Another reason why the recordings are so striking is her accent. In the U.K., people hear American voices all the time, but they probably aren't that sensitive to the implications of accent. For example: when British audiences hear the voices of the actors in the Harry Potter films, it's reasonable to think that they can quickly (though appearances can be deceiving) form assumptions about the geographical origins and the social background of the speakers. They might be able to discern some different American accents, but they aren't so tuned in. It must work the other way around as well. In Plath's case, though, a lot of modern English speakers can recognise that this is an accent that they don't hear very often: a respectable New England voice, speaking with the formality and correctness that characterizes both British and American English of the 1950s. No glottal stops here.

Given the way that readers today appreciate the raw emotion of Plath's poetry, the voice might not seem to fit obviously with a poem like 'Daddy'. Perhaps it indicates that raw emotion might not be the key quality to appreciate in a finely wrought poem? Do you think her way of reading it has special authority to guide our interpretation? How does it affect the way you look at this, or another poem?

There are other places in the Cambridge Authors website where you can consider questions like this. For example, the issues of regional accents and dialects are considered in an interview with Stephen Logan in the Wordsworth section. In the case of 'Daddy', why not try a few experiments. Read it out yourself in different ways: which bits are difficult to get right? Does this tell you something about the poem? Consider also whether your own voice, with its characteristics of location and background: what difference does it make to the poem when read out loud? What difference does a male voice make?

Further Thinking

There are already lots of suggestions here about how to make use of recordings of Plath's voice. You could extend it to other poets, perhaps those who have distinctive regional qualities (for example, Seamus Heaney, or Robert Burns). Please tell us what you have found by adding a comment below.

If you find yourself interested in some of the issues raised here, you might enjoy hearing Stephen Logan speaking about Wordsworth, regional accents, identity, and criticism in the Wordsworth section.

This introduction to the Don Juan stanza by graduate student Tom Durno emphasises its distinctive qualities. The regular, repeating units of rhythm and rhyme give the poem continuity but they also break it up. There is some unique interplay between the predictable qualities offered by this formal structure, and the unpredictable aspects of the story - but there are also subtleties in the stanza itself. After Tom's introduction you'll find a sample passage from the poem and some questions.

1. Introduction

(Tom Durno)

The rhythm and rhyme of Don Juan are characterised by extremes. On the one hand, the poem is so vast that the intricacies of its patterns of sound are often lost amidst its energetic movement from one situation to the next. On the other hand, the sounds of each line of the poem are very carefully and consistently shaped in spite of the narrator's digressions. In Don Juan, rhythm and rhyme provide a pulse to which the poem's offbeat narrative can return, safe in the knowledge that however sharply its scenes and stories contrast with one another, common sounds run through them all.

This contrast between the huge length of the poem and the precise shaping of its individual lines can be described in more formal terms: the poem is narrative, and made up of stanzas. In English literature before Byron, narrative poetry tended to be written in either heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines, as found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Pope's Rape of the Lock) or blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, as found in Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's Prelude) - although there are exceptions, such as Spenser's Faerie Queene. In these poems, the number of lines in each section of the poem is not fixed, so the narrative tends to settle into paragraphs of different lengths, like those found in prose writing. These paragraphs feel natural, as their beginnings and endings mostly fall at the beginnings and endings of scenes within their poems. In Don Juan, groups of lines are organised into stanzas: sections with a particular and repeated number and length of lines, and pattern of rhyme sounds. In Byron's poem, the rough shape and length of each section is fixed, and its beginnings and endings don't always coincide with the beginnings and endings of episodes within the poem: often, Byron's descriptions of events spill over multiple stanzas. In some ways, this can seem unnatural, because the stanzas into which the poem is organised don't always match up with natural pauses in its narrative, as they might do if it was written in paragraphs. But because the rough shape of each stanza is the same throughout the poem, the sound patterns of these stanzas gradually become familiar, and begin to feel comfortable and natural in comparison with the poem's wild and meandering narrative: they provide the poem's consistent pulse.

As with many aspects of Don Juan, however, the poem's rhythm and rhyme are not completely straightforward. Ottava rima, the Italian pattern of line lengths and rhymes that Byron chose for Don Juan, was relatively unfamiliar to English ears in the early nineteenth century. Although Don Juan's rhythm and rhyme do produce a common pulse running through the poem, that pulse was itself uncommon in English poetry at the time. The ottava rima pattern Byron adopts requires that each stanza rhymes with the pattern AB AB AB CC. In Italian, producing three rhyming sounds for each of the 'A' and 'B' words in this pattern is not difficult, as the language has many more words with similar endings than English. In English it is much more difficult, as the language does not rhyme as easily as Italian, and so the rhymes are much more noticeable: English ears are not used to so many repeated sounds in such a long poem. Whilst Don Juan often employs rhythm and rhyme to knit together its unpredictable tales, the poem's rhythms and rhymes are in themselves unfamiliar, and even uncomfortably repetitious.

2. 'For God's sake, reader!'

Read through this passage from the end of Book I of Don Juan. In what ways do you find Byron's use of his stanza interesting? You might like to focus on some of the following (and if you come up with an answer that you'd like to share, add a comment):

1. Rhyme words - as Tom Durno noted, English might not rhyme as easily as Italian. Does Byron seem to smooth this over, or to draw attention to the difficulty? How? With what effect?

2. Stanzas, sentences, paragraphs - these are all units of plot and sense, as Tom says. Do they coincide in this part of the poem? Do rhythm, rhyme, and subject matter seem to be in harmony?

3. Rhythm and voices - in these stanzas Byron quotes other speakers. How do they contribute to the verse form? Are they easily woven into it? How else does Byron draw attention to the burden of filling lines and rhymes?

4. 'Uncomfortably repetitious' - when Tom Durno makes this suggestion, it allows for the possibility that a poem turning 'uncomfortable' might have positive qualities as well as negative ones. This is the end of the book; can you find any ways in which this fields like a long sequence of stanzas coming to a halt?

What is the end of Fame? 't is but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their 'midnight taper,'
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.

What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's King
Cheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other rummaging,
Burglariously broke his coffin's lid:
Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.

But I being fond of true philosophy,
Say very often to myself, 'Alas!
All things that have been born were born to die,
And flesh (which Death mows down to hay) is grass;
You 've pass'd your youth not so unpleasantly,
And if you had it o'er again-'t would pass-
So thank your stars that matters are no worse,
And read your Bible, sir, and mind your purse.'

But for the present, gentle reader! and
Still gentler purchaser! the bard-that 's I-
Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,
And so 'Your humble servant, and good-b'ye!'
We meet again, if we should understand
Each other; and if not, I shall not try
Your patience further than by this short sample-
'T were well if others follow'd my example.

'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters-go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.'
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise-
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.