In September 1997, when I was in London, Ted Hughes phoned me to say he was also in London and we should meet for coffee. We met in Chelsea, but the Parisian style Colbert, where Ted wanted to go, was closed, so we found a cafe along Kings Road where we could sit and talk

Ted told me about the forthcoming publication of Birthday Letters. Then he began to talk about his recent experiences teaching ‘The Power of Words’ to a group of bankers, accountants, and other ‘money–people’ as part of a series of three–week seminars for Tony Buzan‘s Lichtenstein Global Trust Academy.Ted and Tony Buzan shared an interest in memory systems, and Ted had taught ‘creativity and memory’ at Tony Buzan‘s Lichtenstein Academy in 1995 and 1997. The outline for his April 1997 workshops included ‘Mind Skills’, two sessions on ‘The Power of Words’, and an ‘Open Poem Contest’ (British Library ms 88918/127/2). One of the things Ted told me he had done in his ‘Power of Words’ workshops was to give the group ‘a pair of words that were opposites’ – seemingly contradictory words or images, like ‘A bunch of flowers and a dagger’ or ‘A mother and a stone’. These were meant to spark their imaginations, and he would then ask them to use the techniques he and Tony had been teaching to create a poem. One man had been so excited to discover that he could write poems that he had continued to do so after the course and was now, Ted said, writing some ‘rather good poems’.

In a letter Ted wrote to Simon Jenkins of The Times in 1998, Ted described how metaphor and simile ‘give access to the whole mind’, and how the results he got in the courses he had taught ‘were staggering’ (BL ms 88918/127/6). When Ted mentioned Frances Yates, he was surprised that I had read her books, and we talked a little about them. Of special interest to Ted was her comprehensive history of memory systems, from the Classical Greek teaching of memory as part of the skills of rhetoric in Ad Herennium and in Aristotle’s De Anima, to the works of sixteenth century figures like the anatomist, Robert Fludd, and the Hermeticist, Giordano Bruno. A copy of Yates’s, The Art of Memory, is among the books from Ted’s library that Carol Hughes sold to Emory University in Atlanta; and Yates explored the memory systems of Robert Fludd and Giordano Bruno in depth in her later books.

Ted’s own memory system was akin to those of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Giordano Bruno. Both men had emphasised the importance and the power of images and imagination. Both taught methods of linking images into a coherent network or ‘chain’ (Bruno’s word). And both believed that images must be made ‘active’ and vivid, so that they are more easily remembered and effective.

Yeats quotes Bruno’s statements that ‘to understand is to speculate with images’ and that ‘the function of the imagination of ordering the images in memory is an absolutely vital one’ (pp.251–2). And she notes that Aristotle’s dictum in de Anima that ‘the soul never thinks without a mental picture’ was, and is, widely believed by mnemicists (p.47).

In a letter to Sylvia Plath in 1956, Ted wrote that trying to get a mental picture or concept ‘with all its details there, vivid in your brain’ was like ‘taking a thought and forcing it into shape or realness’. This, for him, led to ‘a barren feeling abstraction’. But to ‘try to look at the actual thing happening in front of you’; to ‘imagine the thing happening in [your] world’; to ‘get the feel, weight, sound, every nuance of atmosphere about a concrete thing’, was, for him, ‘a process of memory’ that made everything come right (THL 52).

This is exactly what he told young listeners to do in the programmes he wrote in 1961 for the BBC series ‘Listening and Writing’, which were later published in Poetry in the Making (Faber 1967): imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it…Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this the words look after themselves, like magic.

For the Hermeticist, Bruno, memory was a ‘magico–religious technique, a way of becoming joined to the soul of the world’ and images needed to be ‘emotionally charged’ with Love (254). For Aristotle, it was sufficient to distort them; and Yates repeats Aristotle’s suggested methods for making images memorable:

if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks so that the similarity may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that the form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images...that too, will ensure our remembering them more readily (p.26).

This is precisely what Ted suggests when he introduces the poems that he reads in 101 Poems to Learn By Heart (Faber Audiotape, 1997).

Using Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poem ‘Inversnaid’ as an example, he suggests that the poem might be broken down into a list of images: ‘A peaty burn / A brown horse /An avalanche / A roaring lion / A hen coop’, etc. He then takes each image, embellishes it, and shows just how it might be linked to the next to form a chain by which the whole poem can be perfectly remembered. ‘A peaty burn’, for example can be imagined, ‘like a frame in a colour film’, as a stream. But to make sure it is ‘burn’ you remember, rather than ‘stream’, you might imagine that the water is on fire, with huge flames and billowing smoke. The brown horse could be escaping from the stream with its mane on fire; and the fleeing, burning horse might create an avalanche with great boulders falling all around; and so on.

In 1995 and 1996, Ted wrote several Anamnemonica (unforgettable) poems, using this technique of linked images, for the Memory test (the ‘Memoriad’) in Tony Buzan‘s Mind Sports Olympiad. Using these images, Ted claimed, a person could perform the whole play mentally, with all the scenes and main issues in the right order. At least six of these poems are among Ted’s manuscripts at the British Library and each is based on one of Shakespeare’s plays:

‘A Case of Knives’: (Julius Caesar)
‘The Blackened Pearl’: (The Merchant of Venice)
‘A Storm in a Loving Cup’: (The Tempest) (Published in Raymond Keene&lrquo;s The Official Biography of Tony Buzan. Raymond Publications, 2013, p.365)
‘Anamnemonica’: (Hamlet)
‘A Shuffled Pack’: (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
‘The Honey Bee’: (?)

(BL Mss 88918/127/1, 2 and 8)

Tony Buzan’s memory system, which he taught for many years, was different to Ted’s but it too relied on linked images and imagination. To create one of his ‘Mind Maps’, you take a blank sheet of paper, write the subject of your investigation in the middle, then write words or short phrases around it referring to anything, however seemingly irrelevant of bizarre, that you can imagine or remember about that subject. You connect these by a line, or lines, to the central image. You then link these prompts together to make a coherent pattern.

Ted used this technique, and there are a number of Mind Maps among his manuscripts at the British Library (MSS 88918/12/4 ff 1-21). In two of these, Ted has drawn a small bird in the middle of the page, which could be a crow. Linked to it are, on one sheet, words like ‘Birth’ (with sub–links to ‘1st Lesson’, ‘Spirit River Falls’, ‘Demon Hunters’), ‘Beetle’, ‘Whirlwind’ and ‘Heaven’. On the other sheet some of these words recur and there are additions like ‘City’ (linked to ‘Cults’, ‘Animals’ and ‘Mosaic Snake’), ‘Windy Eskimos’, ‘Ritual’, ‘Holy Beasts’, and more. A much more complicated map is focussed on ‘Sophia’ (the goddess of Wisdom), with twelve numbered links to words including ‘Klippoth’, ‘Aion Jesus’, ‘her12 Apaches’, ‘Gnosis’, ‘Air’ ‘Water’, ‘Earth’, ‘Fire’, and many other words or phrases for disparate thoughts. <.p>

Discussing Ted’s Lichtenstein experiences with Danny Weissbort, shortly after Ted’s death, I asked him what he knew about Mind Maps. He told me that Ted had tried to teach him to use them and that they worked well but he had never followed it up. He also said that he knew nothing about Ted’s teaching at the Lichtenstein Academy, but that teaching poetry to accountants was just the sort of thing Ted liked to do. He added that Ted loved teaching and loved teaching children, especially.

Keene’s biography of Tony Buzan also mentions their shared interest in teaching children, and that Tony and Ted had worked together on a nationwide scheme for training active poets in the art and science of memory, and then training those same poets to use their skills of imagination and association which are at the heart of memory, as the basis for simile and metaphor in helping to release the poetic souls of the children they were teaching (with the declared aim of helping to create ‘warriors of the mind’. (Keene, p.351).

Ted’s most remarkable demonstration of the use of his own memory techniques is, of course, Birthday Letters. ‘I remember’ he says; and ‘Remember how we picked daffodils?’ he asks Sylvia. Constantly, throughout the sequence, he conjures her and visualises her: ‘I see you’, ‘There you are in all your innocence…’, ‘I look up – as if to meet your voice’, ‘I can feel your bounced and dangling anguish’, ‘You aged about ten there, skipping and still skipping’. He sees, touches, listens–to and feels places, people and events, just as he advised young writers to do; and everywhere in Birthday Letters the power of linked images and imagination is evident . So, too, are the emotions and the Love that Giordano Bruno believed necessary to activate the images and complete the magic.

Both Bruno and Ted were poets. Bruno wrote of the importance of memory and imagination to poets and painters, and Yates discusses this in some detail, but apart from their shared belief in the importance of both these skills, Ted’s and Bruno’s memory systems were quite different.

In his introduction to 101 Poems to Learn by Heart, Ted says that there are ‘several memory techniques’, including the ‘tedious’ one of learning by rote, which has long been taught in schools. He was clearly familiar with the many well–documented techniques outlined by Yates in The Art of Memory, but he also knew of the long and arduous memory training undertaken by the Celtic bards, which is the underlying theme in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Ted’s own lifelong practice of learning, teaching, experimenting, and using his own memory system clearly shows that he was very much part of this long poetic tradition of memory training.