A Note on Ted Hughes and Jonathan Swift

Ted Hughes, three months before he died, when he had completed the huge project that became Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) and the two long original essays in the collected prose of Winter Pollen (1994), complained that he had spent too much time writing prose. He even believed that this had somehow destroyed his immune system (Letters 719). He wrote that, avoiding the issue of engaging with the material in what became Birthday Letters, he ‘took refuge in prose’ (ibid). Certainly his major poetry collections were behind him (with River in 1983). He described his late absorption in prose with a reference to an image from an iconic, not to say mythologised, moment from his days as a Cambridge undergraduate: ‘5or 6 years nothing but prose – nothing but burning the foxes’ (ibid). In his famous record of a dream he was writing his weekly essay on the English course, this time on Samuel Jonson, and a fox had appeared with burnt paws which he planted on the page and said ‘You are destroying us’ (see Winter Pollen pp. 8-9). Hughes switched, as was actually not uncommon amongst English students, to Archaeology and Anthropology for his final year