Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn were Cambridge contemporaries who were often anthologized together. Their early poetic affiliations didn't last, but they did work together during the 1970s. This lunchtime lecture explores some of the overlooked correspondences from their mid-career years when, as well as being anthologized, they became anthologizers and collaborated on an anthology of English poetry (which they never finished). It is a collaboration which brings both poets back to Shakespeare and their Cambridge beginnings...
We begin as the poets re-establish their connection. Outside of the 'Worlds' poetry anthology series that initially printed the two poets together, by the 1970s the duo now appear to be worlds apart. While Hughes is loosing sheep, Gunn is losing sleep; one poet hard at work on a Devonshire farm, the other partying hard in San Francisco. But they arrive on common ground soon enough. In one poem, Ted Hughes describes the blustery Devonshire landscape - 'The wind is inside the hill. / The wood is a struggle - like a wood / struggling through a wood' - and Gunn writes to Hughes to say that his use of repetition here is 'pure invention [...] immediately clear and unmistakably right'.
This talk looks at - or through - Hughes's wordy, woody entanglement (and Gunn's appreciation of it) and finds Shakespeare behind Hughes's inspired rhetorical technique.
We'll explore how, in nature poems and elsewhere, Gunn's comments about Hughes's verbal inventiveness unearth common affinities - thematic and rhetorical - between both poets. And these affinities seem to be especially visible when the wind or other abstract, unstable, or oppositional force enters their poems.
We'll also see how the poets' approaches may be said to inspire and influence one another; how they draw on diverse forms of rhetorical repetition which are both rooted in, and routed through, the works of Shakespeare and the English literary tradition as Hughes and Gunn might have encountered them as Cambridge undergraduates...
Anyone interested in these poets - in the nature of repetition, or the repetition of nature in their work - should join poet and PhD student Oliver Newman for this talk that hopes to breathe some fresh air into well-known poems by both authors.
The Cambridge Festival will take place between 16 March and 2 April 2026. Link to the festival programme: https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/events
Link to book for this event: https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/events/teds-talk-hughes-shoots-breeze-thom-gunn
