Comparative Study between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney

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Introduction

Twentieth-Century English Poetry contains the poetry of over 280 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Isaac Rosenberg, D.H. Lawrence and Carol Ann Duffy and many others. It also incorporates works by poets such as Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Louis MacNeice and Siegfried Sassoon. This synopsis will focus on the two such poets of the twentieth century: Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

Edward James Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998), popularly known as Ted Hughes, was the youngest child of William Henry Hughes and Edith Farrar Hughes. He was an English poet and a British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death on 28 October 1998. Hughes was a multitalented poet and he is best acknowledged for creating influential poems that feature bold metaphors, echoing language, imagery, and speech rhythms. Hughes’s poetry, according to Seamus Heaney reflects these traits along with, ‘racial memory, animal instinct and poetic imagination all flow into one another with an exact sensuousness.’ Hughes’s poetry signals a spectacular departure from the prevailing modes of the period. Unlike R.S. Thomas & Tom Gunn who preferred to write on the bleak beauty of the British Landscapes Ted Hughes preferred to differ by choosing to focus his poetic works to root in nature and, in particular, the innocent coarseness of animals. The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a lasting influence on his work. To read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature, especially by animals. This holds true for nearly all of his books, from The Hawk in the Rain to Wolfwatching (1989) and Moortown Diary (1989), two of his late collections. Hughes’s love of animals was one of the catalysts in his decision to become a poet. According to London Times contributor Thomas Nye, Hughes once confessed “that he began writing poems in adolescence when it dawned upon him that his earlier passion for hunting animals in his native Yorkshire ended either in the possession of a dead animal, or at best a trapped one. He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow.” However, Hughes’s interest in animals was generally less naturalistic than symbolic. Using figures such as “Crow” to approximate a mythic everyman, Hughes’s work speaks to his concern with poetry’s vatic, even shamanic powers.

Seamus Justin Heaney was born in 1939 and died in 2013. He was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. During his lifetime, he was an important figure in poetry and he is believed to be one of the best Irish poets of all times. Seamus Heaney received several awards during his lifetime, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Foster award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1995), the Golden Wreath of Poetry, and the T. S. Eliot prize, among others. He was born in Northern Ireland, raised in County Derry, and then lived many years in Dublin. In the 1960’s Seamus Heaney became a lecturer in St College in Belfast after attending Queen’s University Belfast. From 1981 to 2006, he lived part-time in the United States. Seamus Heaney worked as a professor and was a “Poet in Residence” in Harvard University. His most notable works are: North, Field Work, The Spirit Level, Beowulf, District and Circle, and Human chain. Furthermore, one of his most well-known poetry collections is Death of a Naturalist. Death of a Naturalist was issued in 1966 and was Heaney’s first major published collection. The book won several awards, including the Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and consists of 34 short poems.

Though both the two poets have different genre or area of interest yet they have some similarities in them. Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney both portrayed their own feelings or human instincts by using animal imagery into their works. Also both the two poets belong to the poets of post world war so some of their poetries also resemble the essence of world wars.

Content

This dissertation will further approach the study of comparing works, style, technique, and impact of world war in the poetry of the two famous poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Both the two poets have been into a complex friendship and were greatly influenced by each other’s works. The works of Heaney and Hughes tough are different yet have some similarities. If we go through their poems of them we will see that both the two poets use the elements of ‘past’ in their poetries. Both the poets belonged to the twentieth century but their work resembles the essence of the ancient world. Also both the poets had been through world wars and had seen devastation from their own eyes which we could clearly see in their works too. Like ‘Six Young Men’ by Ted Hughes and ‘In a Field’ by Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes ‘Six Young Men’ is inspired by a photograph of six men shot at Lumb Falls near Hebden Bridge in the earlier part of the last century. All the six men were killed in the First World War.

Six Young Men by Ted Hughes is a poem based on the true story of six soldiers who were killed during First World War. Hughes here with their reference tried to explain the condition of those poor soldiers as well as their families. Heaney on the other hand also describes the same scene of the First World War in his poem In a Field where he describes about a soldier who returned to his family after the war.

Another tools that this dissertation will focus on to bring out the comparative study between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney is the way of using nature and showing how ferocious it can turn in order to harm human life. Ted Hughes ‘wind’ and Seamus Heaney’s storm on the island’ is the perfect example for the same. Both storm and wind are the two powerful image of air. Here in the two poems both the poets use them as a title which gives reader a clear sense of warning at the beginning about how this poem will go on to explain the disaster they produce and also how it can turn dangerous for human beings’ life. In the poem ‘Wind’ Ted Hughes moved further and shows ferocious wind and also its effects on land. Wind is all about nature and the struggle of man with it. The poet in the poem talks about a deadly night that was stormed by strong and fierce winds and the helplessness of man in front of it. The poem is divided into six stanzas each talking about the terror of the wind.

Seamus Heaney’s “Storm on an Island” is included in Death of a Naturalist. This poem shows us how the islanders live their lives on an island that is frequently been hit by fierce and ravaging storms.

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Comparative Study between Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney

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