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8 - Hughes and the classics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

Vanda Zajko
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Terry Gifford
Affiliation:
Bath Spa University
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Summary

Hughes’s engagement with classical texts was not that of the ‘lapsed classicist’ whose formal acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature provided a privileged frame of reference throughout his life, nor was he a self-declared ‘outsider’ for whom the appropriation of the classical constituted a defiant political gesture. Hughes’s interest in ancient literature was distinctive precisely because it formed part of a much wider interest in the narrative repositories of the past and did not treat material from Greece and Rome with particular reverence. His preoccupation with what he described as the ‘mythic’ quality of writers led him to construct a poetic genealogy within which Aeschylus and Euripides took their place alongside Milton, Coleridge, Keats and Yeats, and to value the work of both ancient and modern poets as much for what eluded expression as for their words. On Hughes’s reading, classical authors were oriented away from their place in the literary canon and re-evaluated for the part they play in rendering visible archaic matter, the productions of the collective mythic imagination, now dimly remembered by an aggressively modern world as dream.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • Hughes and the classics
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.009
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  • Hughes and the classics
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.009
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Hughes and the classics
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.009
Available formats
×