Ted's talk: Hughes shoots the breeze with Thom Gunn

Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn were Cambridge contemporaries who were often anthologised together. Their early poetic affiliations didn’t last, but they did work together during the 1970s. This talk explores some of the overlooked correspondences from their mid-career years when, as well as being anthologised, they became anthologisers and collaborated on an anthology of English poetry that they never finished. A collaboration that 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 once printed these poets together, in the 1970s they appear to be worlds apart. While Hughes is losing 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 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 that are especially visible when the wind (or other unstable, abstract 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 that are both rooted in, and routed through, the works of Shakespeare and the English literary tradition as Hughes and Gunn might have encountered them at Cambridge … as they also attempt to define their own literary landscape in their anthology.

Anyone who is interested in these poets – in the nature of repetition, the repetition of nature in their work or the English literary tradition more generally – 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.