about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters*

Ted Hughes again, from the eye of the storm:
( 9 November 1966, to Richard Murphy):

“Everything back here is more or less in one piece – usual corruptions, usual family coup d’états, usual shatterings of fragile sentimental treasures, usual heaps of loathly ashes in the flower-beds, place nearly burned down with the bonfire, children regressed to unrecognisable savages, usual wild tales – not the entertaining sort that travellers bring back but the consequential sort they return to. However, the proverb now in power is ‘Retire from trouble and sing to it’.”

Retire from trouble and sing to it. Of course that is just what poetry is. There’s another letter, written several years later to his daughter Frieda when she was at school and had to write a play about Cleopatra (I know! I can just see that at Stoke Newington). This letter feels incredibly important to me. There’s one point where he’s been talking about the reading she should do – Plutarch’s Lives, mainly – and then he’s talking about writing it, and the scenes she could put in if she wanted to. He says Shakespeare wrote 50 scenes at least, and all he ever read was the Plutarch. I just love that!

I remember, back in 2007, writing resentfully of the fact that even the few poets asked by the newspapers didn’t choose books of poetry for their ‘Books of the year’. Even the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, only came as close as choosing Ted Hughes’ letters. “Ted Hughes’ letters!” I thought. “Why can’t he choose someone’s poems! He’s the bloody Poet Laureate! And he chooses flipping letters! I don’t care if they’re from Ted Hughes!”

Well, please allow me to say this now. It’s still the first half of February, and this is my book of the year.

There will be more. The whole reason I’m reading it is because I’ve been commissioned to write about it, so I don’t want to peak too early, as the saying goes, but it will be an in-depth piece and obviously more than just a “review.” We know the book is good, and important, so I’m hardly giving the game away by saying that!

* You can never have too much of a good thing – so here. (nb. Ignore the commentary.)