A. Alvarez, Ted Hughes, and the Rise of Confessional Poetry

A. Alvarez's The New Poetry and the Gentility Principle

A. Alvarez's The New Poetry is a poetic anthology featuring figures of postwar Great Britain. The introduction, titled “The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle,” sets the stage for the collection, which is divided into two sections: British and American poems.

Alvarez strongly supported American styles but reproved the excessive “gentility” of British poetry, criticizing its assertion of overly orderly and polite attitudes. He attributed this attitude to British isolation, but argued that after World War II, isolation and the “forces of disintegration” began to destroy the old principles of civilization. Thus, the new English poetry required “a new seriousness.” British poets like Kingsley Amis and G. Hill were included in the anthology.

Defining Confessional Poetry

Poets like Ted Hughes were valued for taking risks and openly dealing with their own experiences, transforming poetry into a beneficial interaction between the poet and the reader. These poets were later given the name confessional poets.

Irving Howe defined the confessional poem as one where the writer speaks directly to the reader, sharing details about their life without the intervention of an imagined event or persona. Themes often addressed included subjects hidden from society:

• Insanity
• Sex
• Suicide

The poem needed to address these themes straightforwardly; confessional poetry required addressing these themes straightforwardly, moving beyond mere subject matter or self-emphasis.

Ted Hughes: Violence, Nature, and Myth

Hughes’s poetry is deeply connected to his experience in the Yorkshire highlands, which often serves as a connecting element, alongside his use of dialect.

Analysis of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970)

Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) features poems normally narrated with direct declarative sentences. The content is often cruel and monstrous. Crow is inspired by the Native American mythical figure of the Trickster—a mischievous and troublesome character, often a raven, who disturbs God’s plans by bringing chaos and destruction.

Paul Rading states that Crow is a character with no values, simultaneously a creator and a destructor, who does not know good nor evil but is responsible for both. For example, in “A Childish Prank,” after God creates Adam and Eve and struggles to place souls in their bodies, Crow invents sex. God tries to be generous and attempts to teach Crow human skills and emotions to change his egocentric nature, but Crow instead creates “Crow’s theology” (a study of the nature of God).

Through Crow, Hughes explores the human psyche and reworks the legends of the Creation and the Apocalypse from a nihilistic point of view (one that denies all existence).

Wolfwatching: Mythology and Personal Themes (1989)

Wolfwatching (1989) references Native American ritual practices and modern British life. Its themes include:

• Mythology and folklore
• Eastern philosophies
• Personal poems about family members and the Yorkshire landscape

Overall themes across Hughes’s work include violence, animals, war, personal relationships, and the self with respect to nature.

Early Volumes: The Brutality of the Natural World

The volume The Hawk in the Rain features poems such as:

• “The Thought-Fox”
• “The Hawk in the Rain”
• “The Jaguar”

These poems are characterized by fresh, direct diction and an unsentimental approach toward nature and animals.

The volume Lupercal depicts the brutality of the natural world, often showing men possessed by beastly, animalistic urges. It is noted for its economy of style. “Hawk Roosting,” a famous animal poem, has a suggestive title: a roost is a place where a bird sleeps, and the hawk is a bird of prey. It presents an insensitive, violent, and grim picture of Nature as never-ceasing (allowing no changes).

A central idea in Hughes’s poetry, especially his animal poems, is that man is incapable of making sense of his existence unless Nature is reencountered.