Excerpt
Preface 'The page is printed.'
I
The present edition gathers in one volume the poetry published by Ted Hughes. It includes the familiar sequence of individual Collections, from The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), and takes account of a less familiar penumbra of broadsides, pamphlets and limited editions, published by numerous small presses and imprints during
the same decades in which the official canon of his poetry was established with Faber and Faber. Hughes's engagement with small press publication extended to the co-ownership of actual presses, as a collaborative, even familial mode of literary production -- and as an alternative to the protocols of trade publishing, according to which an author might be expected not to contribute to the design of a book, or choose its endpapers, or propose the typeface (declaring an abiding preference for blackest Bodoni) -- all of which counted among Hughes's concerns.
During the 1970s, at the height of this engagement, much of Hughes's writing was initially published or collected by the Rainbow Press, an imprint owned by the poet and his sister Olwyn Hughes. ('The name of the press was related to an early plan -- defeated by vagaries in the availability of materials -- to have each smaller-format title bound in a different shade of leather so that the book spines would form a "rainbow" along the shelf.'*) Between 1979 and 1983, to take another example, the Morrigu Press -- consisting of an Albion hand press contributed by Olwyn Hughes -- published nearly twenty separate broadsides of individual poems by Hughes, all printed by his son Nicholas (a Blakean version of ownership of the means of production). Again, the Gehenna Press (Paradise Lost, I, 405: '. . . And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell'), set up by his lifelong friend and collaborator Leonard Baskin, published the first broadside of a Hughes poem in 1959 -- 'Pike', from The Hawk in the Rain -- and equally published his very last volume of poetry, Howls & Whispers, 'during the promising Spring of 1998', as the Gehenna colophon hopefully expressed it, just a few months before his death.
There was no Faber edition of Howls & Whispers, nor of several other private press volumes, notably Recklings (1967), Orts (1976), A Primer of Birds (1981), and Capriccio (1990). On the other hand, Remains of Elmet, Spring Summer Autumn Winter (Season Songs), Prometheus On His Crag and Moortown Elegies (Moortown Diary) began as limited editions and subsequently became Faber volumes. For Hughes these practices were complementary rather than opposed, and one of the roles of the small press was as a tiring room or rehearsal space. A constant small revisionary activity accompanied -- or even defined -- the sending out of poems into the world. On their first publication, in the sense of 'issued for sale to the public', many poems were already subject to post-publication revision. The Collected Poems must therefore reconcile two systems of
publication within one chronology: the volumes which established Hughes's
reputation -- The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, Gaudete, River and other collections -- were accompanied or tugged into view by a hidden flotilla of smaller vessels, some of them fugitive, gaily coloured and strangely
shaped. If the present edition, like the Collected Poems of any poet, ratifies a known body of work, it is also a display of fresh evidence: the poet encountered in these pages has yet to be fully assimilated.
In addition to the private press editions, many individual poems by Hughes first appeared in periodicals and as contributions to books. From the outset, and encouraged by his first wife Sylvia Plath, Hughes made extensive use of periodical publication prior to collecting poems in volume form. Later on, the private press to some extent replaced the intermediate role of the periodical, but throughout his career Hughes sent poems out to an eclectic and inclusive range of journals and rnagazines. Many of these -- American or Australian as much as British -- were short-lived, and many of the poems which appeared in their pages were never reprinted. The present edition has sought to include all (nearly one hundred and fifty) uncollected poems.
With the exception of the poems written for children, whose presence or absence is discussed below, the Collected Poems therefore includes the ensemble of the published poetry. Or rather, it includes only the poems which Hughes published (or which, in two relevant instances, were broadcast rather than printed). His manuscripts, now deposited in various collections -- most importantly in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, Atlanta -- are voluminous for all aspects of the poetry and all stages of the career, but their collation must await the long-term project of a Complete Poems. For the present edition, pre-publication materials have not been consulted: no unpublished poems have been included in the text, and no manuscript drafts or variants for published poems have been recorded in the notes. The Collected Poems is an interim edition, restricted to the print history of the poetry.
II
Questions of structure inevitably arise, given the involutions of that history. On the one hand, the various kinds of publication -- periodical, private press, trade -- are accorded equal rights of inclusion. On the other hand a chronology must be established, and therefore a hierarchy. Hence the Collected Poems retains the familiar public shapes of Hughes's poetry -- its volume-by-volume progress, from The Hawk in the Rain to Birthday Letters -- as an overall structural principle: the sequence of Faber collections has been followed, as have their individual contents and ordering of poems. A slight exception has been made for Crow, which evolved through a succession of part-publications, and is here presented as a process which both preceded and followed the Faber edition.
Those private press volumes for which there were no subsequent Faber editions have been included in their entirety. However, where individual poems from these volumes appeared later on in Faber contexts, the Collected Poems follows suit: thus a poem from A Primer of Birds (1981) which reappears in Wolfwatching (1989) is placed with the latter collection, to reflect Hughes's intentions and to maintain the familiar contours of his poetry. The endnotes to each collection explain the local accommodations required in the interests of what might be called chronological advantage.
Sometimes the Faber collections themselves have more than one life.
Remains of Elmet (1979) and River (1983) were considerably altered for their reissue in Three Books (1993). Since the Collected Poems has sought to include all of Hughes's printed poems -- including poems subsequently omitted from the canon as it evolved -- it has been decided to print the contents and follow the ordering of the
original Faber editions, for reasons of chronology and of inclusiveness, while nevertheless offering the revised texts of individual poems (see the Note on the Text, page 1238). Likewise, the new poems which Hughes added to these two sequences in 1993 find their point of entry later on in the Collected Poems.
The attempt to shape a single chronology, while preserving the integrity of individual Faber collections, has dictated that uncollected poems be entered in groups between those collections -- following Hughes's own policy when he inserted groupings of hitherto uncollected poems at various junctures in his New Selected Poems (1995). They are here entered by their dates of (first) publication, and the chronology of the edition is in all respects a chronology of publication. There is little evidence in Hughes's typescripts for dates of composition, and his tendency to engage simultaneously in different projects discourages attempts to date poems circumstantially by composition.
III
Hughes's collections are full of cross-pollination. Poems originally intended for Crow were finally published in Cave Birds; poems shared out between Wodwo and Recklings were first published together on the same pages of periodicals; the Gaudete epilogue poems have close affinities with Orts, and so on. On the
one hand, from Crow onwards, Hughes worked predominantly with sequences (Moortown Diary, Season Songs, Gaudete, Adam and the Sacred Nine, Cave Birds, Prometheus On His Crag, River, Remains of Elmet, Tales from Ovid, Birthday Letters), the only thoroughgoing exception to which is Wolfwatching. On the other hand, the borders even of the sequence are permeable to a traffic in individual poems, as if the alternative modes of production at his disposal encouraged Hughes to take
a provisional view of what might be termed the unrepeatability of the poem, and its supposed fixity of place.
Thus a well-known poem like 'A Dove' appears in A Primer of Birds (1981), and in Season Songs (1985), and in Wolfwatching (1989); individual poems from The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo reappear three decades later in Elmet (1994); sometimes the same poem belongs equally in twocollections (as opposed to putting in a guest appearance): 'Sheep' and 'March Morning Unlike Others' are integral both to Moortown Diary and to Season Songs,
and are entered in both sequences in the present edition. This plurality of intentions means that editorially there are false friends throughout the work -- the same poem under different titles, different poems under the same title -- and that the fortunes of any individual poem are likely to be picaresque: 'Leaf Mould', to take one example, was first collected in Remains of Elmet (1979) under the title 'Hardcastle Crags'; it reappeared in the TLS in 1985, in heavily revised form but using the same title, and this version was then collected with further revisions in Wolfwatching (1989) under the new title of 'Leaf Mould'; after which it re-entered Remains of Elmet -- in Three Books (1993) -- and was reprinted in Elmet (1994) before coming to rest, with further small variations, in New Selected Poems (1995).
Hughes changed poems when he changed their places. Moreover these revisions were not usually incorporated into subsequent reprints of the collection in which the poem originally appeared. For example, the changes made to various Wodwo poems for their inclusion five years later in Selected Poems 1957-1967 were never incorporated into subsequent reprints of Wodwo. The reader stands in an open and populous field, rather than on the path of a tidy self-replacement in which earlier versions are progressively disowned. Several texts of a Hughes poem often coexist in print, depending on whether it is encountered in its original setting, or in the changed context of a later collection, or in one of his several selections of his poetry (including those meta-selections, Moortown and Elmet), or even in one of his children's collections.
*footnotes have been omitted
Copyright © 2003 The Estate of Ted Hughes