A Question Of Quality

Had to battle to read the poems in the Wolfwatching section of Hughes's Collected Poems in recent days. This surprised me. I got hold of a second hand copy of the book some years back and thought the title poem quite brilliant - up there with the very best of the poet. But I didn't make much of the rest, except for The Black Rhino which seemed a powerful one-off, very effectively fulfilling its purpose of campaigning to save the animal in question from imminent extinction. Generally though I think I assumed that there was something lacking in me as a reader and that I would one day grasp more of what Hughes was doing in the collection, especially regarding the poems that seemed to relate to his family.

That feeling was reinforced by bits and pieces of commentary I read haphazardly over the years which suggested that the autobiographical poems were something of a breakthrough for the poet. So I thought that I would find myself achieving something of a breakthrough myself in my appreciation of the collection, especially having been so deeply soaked in Hughes's work for much of the year. But it wasn't to be.

The poems about his relatives seemed to me difficult to read, even when I had a greater inkling of context than I had when first encountering the collection. I found them a bit clumsy, a bit overly dramatic in a way that wasn't quite real. And the remainder of the poems I thought poor stuff, redeemed here and there by muscular lines, but weighed down by obsessive references to the usual obsessions, now becoming tiresome. Which leads me to ask whether it's reasonable to say there are quite a few downright bad poems in the sequence and a fatal lack of quality control.

I think it's a question worth asking and worth answering firmly in the negative. Part of this writer's strength lies in the pouring out of work of uneven quality. A real encounter with Hughes involves acceptance of the seemingly clumsy, a surrender to the fact that he needed to write, to get the poems out there, even when he had doubts about what he was doing. The amazing thing is that the fully achieved work can be found everywhere, even in the inconsistent sequences. And there may well be some lack in myself that a different reader might compensate for to make the poems live, for them at least.