INFLUENCES: JUNG, GRAVES, YEATS.

James Barrett, who is a Jungian Psychotherapist who has been researching the relationship between Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and Jung's Answer to Job, commented to me that there is so much correspondence between Hughes' and Jung's work it would be of benefit to the scholars of each man's work if they could be more aware of each other. He noted that Jung constantly claimed to be a scientist but in effect was working as a radical artist to transform western culture through a recovery of the religious feminine; and Ted worked poetry as a cultural physician, as a 'shepherd of being' as Craig Robinson put it (Robinson, Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being, Macmillan, 1989). Each also had a phenomenal capacity to absorb and creatively use occult studies.

* * * * * * * *

Yeats was an enormous influence on Hughes, not just because of his occult interests but because of the simple, direct 'voice' he achieved in his late poems and also to some extent because of Yeat's fostering of a National literature for Ireland - the way he took on the traditional Bardic role for his people. In 1970, Hughes told Ekbert Faas that he came to Yeats' poetry through "his other interests, folklore, and magic in particular" (The Unaccommodated Universe, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1980. p. 202) and that Yeats had "spellbound" him for about six years. In a letter to Anne-Louise Bujon (LTH 16 Dec. 1992) he described how, after he happened on Yeats' The Wanderings of Oissin in the school library, he was "swallowed alive by Yeats" and "simply tried to learn the whole of Yeats". He did learn the Complete Poems.

Graves's White Goddess was given to Ted by his English master when he left school. It had a seminal influence on his thinking about poetry and the sources of inspiration, but Graves's poetry was less important to Ted then his ideas and philosophies. Ted's early poem 'Song' (THCP 24) is a typical Gravesian White Goddess poem, and as with Graves, the 'Goddess' was incarnated in a living woman (see the other notes about 'Song' on these pages under Hawk in the Rain).

Apart from 'Song', I find no actual echoes of any Graves poem in either Ted's or Sylvia's work. They all shared a belief in some sort of divine inspiration: the 'divine' being notionally attributed to the Goddess but, for Hughes and Plath, being an energy which comes from some unknown, creative source.

Hughes and Plath, were both very influenced, too, by Jung's ideas about the need to balance male and female energies, conscious and unconscious, psyche and reason.

Ted shared Graves's scorn for social conventions based on conformity to dogma - religious, political, social. Both he and Graves were individualists who believed it was necessary to judge things for themselves and to trust on their judgment and their instincts. Graves's poem 'The Cabbage White' encapsulates his own non-conformity and his own faith in instinct, inspiration and the value of flying crooked. And his poems, 'Lollocks' and 'It was all very Tidy', give you an idea of what he thought about the deadening restrictions of reason and social convention. These are beliefs Ted shared with him, Sylvia too, and some of their earlier poems (those from the time when they first met) show similar scorn for conventional mores.

* * * * * * * *

"Ted Hughes, it seems, was absolutely convinced about Graves’ theories about poetry. Does that mean he also believed (in the religious sense of the word) in the White Goddess? Also, do the archetypes you have mentioned in connection with Graves compare at all with Jung’s?"

Graves' The White Goddess and Frazer's The Golden Bough, have had huge influence on English literature and both were fundamental texts for Hughes and Plath. Both books look at the many historical beliefs and practices which underly the religions of the world. In The White Goddess, in particular, there is also a great deal about the way in which the early Earth/Mother/Moon Goddess was replaced by the male gods - a process which began when Apollo had usurped the Oracle of the Priestess at Delphi. The later Christian God perpetuated this usurpation and Christians adapted all the mythologies and rituals associated with the Goddess to their own ends. The Virgin Mary takes her place but as a lesser figure than God. The Roman Catholic religion, however, retained much of the mystery and imaginative power of the early religions. Graves claims, and Hughes agreed with this argument, that Protestant and Puritan iconoclasm destroyed the imaginative power of religion and in the process lost something of immense value. Hughes essay in his first Selection of Shakespeare's Verse (WP 103), spells this out. For Hughes, Aristotle's scientific methods and the subsequent insistence on objective, scientific methods in education which has evolved from this has continued this devaluation of imagination, instinct and intuition.

Both Graves and Hughes identified imagination, dreams, intuition, the unconscious, with the seemingly magical powers of the Earth/Moon Goddess, just as our earliest ancestors did. And both looked beyond any formal religion to the ancient ideas and beliefs on which they grew, although both also believed strongly in spiritual powers. Formal religion, for both poets, was too immersed in dogma - too concerned with power and money, and too distanced from the world of spirit - but neither rejected the idea of some spiritual power as an essential (but too often hidden or suppressed) part of our lives.

For Graves, particular women became the embodiment of the Goddess's powers and thus became his muse. Whether he could be said to have worshipped the Goddess depends of ones definition of 'worship', but he certainly believed that there were female energies which differed from male energies and which were essential to imaginative creativity, and that those energies were channelled through the male poet. I don't think he thought much of women as poets - that was not their role: their role as Muse was more important, and the male poet needed to woo them and to take care not to offend them. Hughes believed much the same (although certainly not that female poets were inferior to male) but for him the equal balance of male and female energies in us and in our world was necessary.

Ted was brought up in an area where the Wesley brothers had preached and had made many converts. He comments on the results of this fiercely puritanical religion in, for example, the poem 'Mount Zion' (THCP 480), where natural energies (a cricket) are seen as dangerously disruptive and must be driven out and destroyed. But Ted had many serious discussion with friends, some of whom were clergymen, about the spirit and the soul. He was given a simple Church-of -England funeral and a Christian Memorial service in Westminster Abbey, both of which he would have approved for ritual and spiritual reasons.

As to the last part of your question: Ted, valued mythological archetypes for their link with the collective subconscious, and his two essays 'Myth and Education' (one is reprinted in Winter Pollen (WP 136-153) are important in this respect.