Sophie ELZIERE
Présentation
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- ‘Cloudy Birds and Crocus Evangels. Ted Hughes and the Poem of Complete Being.’
‘Nuées d’oiseaux et crocus évangiles : Ted Hughes et le poème de l’être complet.’ PhD thesis. Sorbonne Université, Faculté des Lettres. [https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03789589/document]
This thesis explores Ted Hughes’s poetic work and focuses on the question of the completion of being and of language. The poet sheds light on the man of ‘logos’, heir to Socrates and Descartes, criminal because he wanted, by the sole force of his rational mind, to own and control the outer world of nature and to be the master of the inner world of his individuality, body and soul alike. The myths and stories that fill Ted Hughes’s poetic and critical work trace the trajectory of a human being who has acknowledged the harm he has done and asks for forgiveness to the Goddess of Complete Being, both his Mother-Earth and Sacred Bride, both Queen of Hell and Flower of Paradise. As he surrenders to her unconditionally, an ultimate and ‘last-ditch miracle’ occurs, one that reveals his true and divine ‘self at the source’, his ‘vital nucleus’ and ‘the most inaccessible thing of all’. According to the poet, one should speak like the animals and the birds that, far beyond human words, manage to ‘express this being pure and without effort’ and a truth ‘at the core of us – strange, beautiful, pathetic, terrible’. One should decipher the inaudible music of the wind, the grass and the rocks, because it bears the truth of a nameless Goddess, the ‘Annunciation of clay, water and sunlight’, or the ‘crocus evangels’, which tell man that he should take all the risks throughout his journey. The human being that the poet describes has a black wound on his body and a rainbow jewel in his soul; he has been through the softness of agony and the sorrows of ecstasy – and thus he feels the inmost core of being and of language, and the secret of the magic spell cast by poetry.
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- ‘Inhumanity, Impertinence and Improvisation. Crow: King of Carrion and Flayed Poet.’
‘L’inhumanité, l’impertinence et l’improvisation. Crow, poète charognard et poète écorché.’ To be published in Leaves n°18. Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. [https://youtu.be/xVtV8vFMskE]
In Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Ted Hughes wants to show the dreadful consequences of men’s greed and barbarousness. He describes a world that has been completely destroyed and turned into a deserted battlefield and a nightmarish wasteland. This is the rotten kingdom of Crow, the king of carrion and the poet’s alter ego. Crow is a poet-scavenger, whose rhetorical flowers of evil bloom and spread the poisonous perfume of his poetic carrions and the disquieting music of his exquisite corpses. The voice that resonates in the collection is incisive, precise and full of cruelty, betraying, as Julia Kristeva phrases in Powers of Horror, ‘the radical inhumanity of language’. Together with his bird of ill omen, the poet dares everything and never tries to avoid the blows. Still, they must finally surrender, only to reveal, beneath the appearances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin and a tormented soul, exhausted by the intensity of the ordeal.
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- ‘Wodwo, or the Wanderer: to risk being and to risk language.’
‘Wodwo ou l’errant : risquer l’être et risquer le langage.’ In ‘Le Singulier’, L’Atelier n° 11.2 [https://ojs.parisnanterre.fr/index.php/latelier/article/view/553]
In Wodwo, Ted Hughes condemns the men of the modern age who thought that they were at the centre and the top of a world created for them, who exploited and destroyed everything. The poet depicts doomed souls and spectral figures haunted by shadows that have become more powerful and consistent than them. The motif of the katabasis, which is central in Hughes’s collection, sheds light on a necessary conversion of all values. As he turns around, not to take a narcissistic look at himself but, like Orpheus, to meet Eurydice's eyes, the human subject faces the ‘presence of his infinite absence’ and discovers what makes him truly singular. Ted Hughes’s poetic vision and the poetry of Maurice Blanchot’s ideas seem to coincide on this point: the experience of death is the core of the poetic work and its infiniteness, which is the infiniteness of being and of the poetic word itself. Wodwo, a wild, half-human, half-animal creature, is the ‘wanderer, the one always astray,’ who ‘risks’ being and language. When Wodwo speaks, he utters words that are foreign and unstable, words that take man’s singularity and individuality back to an invisible reflection, an intimate but unknowable otherness. Wodwo and his language are one with the natural world: in them rises the inaudible music which resonates when the wind rustles but whose ‘meaning will not part from the rock.’ This is the truth of the wanderer and of the total rhythm of the natural world: in the ‘tension of an infinite beginning,’ they pave the way for the renewal of being and language.
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- ‘Becoming mineral. The cantor of rock and the opened territories of Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes.’
‘Le langage minéral du territoire d’Elmet et la pensée du devenir dans Remains of Elmet de Ted Hughes.’ In Besson, Françoise. dir. Ecrits et Cris de la Terre dans le monde anglophone. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Midi, coll. Caliban, n °61. [https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/6440]
The weather-beaten landscapes of the Calder Valley which are conjured up in Remains of Elmet, a collection of poems by Ted Hughes and photographs by Fay Godwin, convey a sense of the frailty and pettiness of human achievements and of the relentless powers of the natural world. Hughes’s childhood region, tamed by religious custom, devastated by centuries of industrial exploitation, and further burdened by the cost of wartime, is a bleak poetic wasteland. But as nature reclaims its rights and reveals its countless and most hidden riches, it also teaches man his necessary adaptation to its rhythm and shows him new territories to explore. Hughes’s stark poetic voice, one which is still able to resonate in the middle of the deserted moors, as the rain falls and the wind howls, has literally become mineral. It is the voice of the ‘cantor of rock,’ whose wild song, working as a Deleuzian ritournelle, opens the horizons of men’s lives and deaths to unforeseen meanings.