'Collected Poems': The full spectrum of Ted Hughes

Too bad Americans have spent so much energy analyzing Ted Hughes' relationship with Sylvia Plath and so little considering his work. In England, where Hughes was poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998, he has long been considered a major 20th-century poet. With luck, the recent North American release of Hughes' "Collected Poems" will help shift our attention back to his remarkable accomplishments as a writer.

Even at 1,333 pages, "Collected Poems" isn't a complete document of Hughes' poetry. It gives a recap of his published poems, including many from little-known, small-press editions, and includes some translations but no stage or collaborative works, poetry for children or unpublished poems. Presumably, one day we will see Hughes' "Complete Poems," but it will take more than one volume to house it.

Readers first discovered Hughes' high-testosterone language in the 1957 collection "Hawk in the Rain." A "banging wind," he wrote in the title poem, "Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart ... " With its geared-to-shock animal energy, Hughes' voice was distinctive from the start. In the poem "Hawk Roosting," from his 1960 collection "Lupercal," Hughes views the world through the eyes of a raptor:

Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly —
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads —

Hughes came from a generation of confessional poets but seldom bared the literal events of his life. He more often played out his inner dramas in the trappings of nature or mythology — inventing a persona or reworking one from Native American or Greco-Roman tales. That's fitting because Hughes' story, with its suicides, high passions and world fame was, in fact, bigger than life.

The measure of pain he got and bore was heroic, and Hughes addressed it metaphorically in many of his published collections, including the early "Wodwo" (1967), "Crow" (1970) and "Prometheus on his Crag" (1973). Hughes wrote obsessively of death and torment. His poems were a kind of penance. Knowing Plath's poetry and the story of their marriage, as well as other significant landmarks of Hughes' life, helps connect the layered themes and references that reappear throughout his work.

In 1998, shortly before Hughes died, he finally let an eager public get a direct look at how he viewed his relationship with Plath and her 1963 suicide. He published "Birthday Letters, " to a storm of media attention, and "Howls & Whispers," a small-press, limited edition exposing a handful of emotional poems. In one of them, "The Offers," we can see how their ill-fated marriage continued to grow in his psyche. Here, an iconic image of Plath returns in a dream, and the poet sees her "As if new made, half a wild roe, half/ A flawless thing, priceless, facetted/ Like a cobalt jewel" whose final words to him are "This time/ Don't fail me."

Throughout his career, Hughes worked on various translations of the classics. Here again, his identification with mythology and his astonishing instinct for language helped him revitalize the poems. In his selected "Tales from Ovid," Hughes created hands-down the most captivating version of selected stories from Ovid's "Metamorphoses": utterly simple and so musical it begs to be read aloud.

Hughes was prodigious. He's best known in this country for his brawny early poems and the late, controversial "Birthday Letters." Yet there's much more to admire, especially in his extraordinary ability to observe, describe and illuminate a moment. He does it with delicate sorcery in "A Primer of Birds" (1981) and "Flowers and Insects" (1986); and with spectacular force in the 1983 collection "River" where (in the poem "Four March Watercolours") Hughes envisioned the land as "Turning full-face to the entering, widening,/ Flame-cored, burrowing havoc of a jet. Wild, stumpy daffodils/ Shiver under the shock wave."

Hughes was utterly at home in the natural world, the yin and yang of it, the beauty and terror. Sex was his landscape. It radiates in his descriptions of spiders and narcissi, salmon, swans and caged wolves. For Hughes the farmyard mechanics of stillborn calves, the mutilations of war and the soul agony of love all connect to the same brute instinct. In "A Motorbike," a poem about the aftermath of World War II, he says "The men surrendered their weapons/ And hung around limply. ... The shrunk-back war ached in their testicles."

Of course, not all Hughes wrote was profound or memorable. His ungreat poems are much like every poet's unignited material — day-to-day work that keeps the engine running. Hughes was a working poet. The impressive thing, especially in this enormous output of words, is not only how brilliant the poems are, but how many really connect.

The biggest surprise in this volume is the playful charm of Hughes' occasional poems, written as poet laureate to celebrate such events as the birthdays of Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother, for whom Hughes showed a special affection. In a sweetly profound formal poem dedicated to the Queen Mum on her 90th birthday in 1990, Hughes wrote:

Tragic drama gives its greatest
Roles to royalty.
The groundling sees his crowned soul stalk
The stage of history —
'I know,' he mutters, 'But not how,
That majesty is me.'

Anyone who loves poetry but has overlooked Hughes should spend time with his "Collected Poems." The beauty, pain and pleasure in it are great. And admirers of Plath will find a fuller appreciation of her poetry through reading Hughes. Their poems feed on each other and create a dialogue that continued after her death.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com