Community Poems: Ted Hughes and the Eclogue
Correspondence: * Correspondence to Iain Twiddy, Hokkaido University.
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Abstract |
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Three collections Ted Hughes published between 1979 and 1983 demonstrate his intimate concern with different types of community. Hughes elegizes industrial communities in the Calder region in Remains of Elmet, and in the animal elegies of Moortown Diary, he analyses the complex relationship between the human and the natural, as well as tracing the disintegration of a farming community; River is pressurized by conservational anxiety, celebrating the processes of nature while voicing concern over human influence in those ecosystems. As they address the relationship of nature, culture, and loss, as well as the social role of the poet, these collections make use of varieties of Virgilian eclogue. The eclogue records a progression from nature to culture or civilization, in which culture may be consolation for the loss of a more natural state, while the reverse eclogue describes a return from civilization to nature. The types of eclogue which make up Moortown Diary and River, and the reverse eclogues in Remains of Elmet, show Hughes's Virgilian concern over integration – natural, cultural, and poetic – as they observe communities in flux and examine human consciousness estranged from the natural world.