Beschreibung:

Hughes, Ted. FINE COLLECTION OF 22 AUTOGRAPH AND TYPED LETTERS AND 16 POSTCARDS SIGNED ("AS EVER, TED...", ETC), TOGETHER WITH TWO POSTCARDS AND ONE AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED BY CAROL HUGHES, TO NICK GAMMAGE (ONE TO "MISS O'KEEFE", AND ONE TO "R. LEWIS"), VARIOUS SIZES (CHIEFLY FOLIO AND 4TO), CHIEFLY COURT GREEN, NORTH DEVON, 26 NOVEMBER 1969—10 OCTOBER 1998 (THE FINAL LETTER FROM CAROL HUGHES IN JANUARY 1999 RESPONDING TO GAMMAGE'S LETTER OF CONDOLENCE AFTER THE POET'S DEATH IN NOVEMBER 1998), MOST WITH AUTOGRAPH ENVELOPES, TOGETHER WITH AUTOGRAPH DRAFT AND TYPESCRIPT OF HIS POEM "ENTER HAMLET, STARING INTO THE AIR..." a fine discursive series with some extensive discussion on the intentions behind his poetry, his methods of writing, a number of his most celebrated poems and also his views on other poets, religion, modern history and the relationship of mankind to the natural world the series commencing when his recipient was an English student in the late 1970s, and wrote to him about Gaudete ("...the test will be, will anybody be reading Gaudete in twenty years?...The only thing is to ignore the public, & go ahead in your own way..."), then responding to a request for views on D.H. Lawrence ("...Lawrence...is blended into the cultural air as we breathe. It is not easy to know what is our own and what came through him – it is probably impossible, since so many salient ideas of his were not original with him either..."), then on his own work, such as the poem "Wind" in his first collection and later poems in Remains of Elmet inspired by the football match in Heptonstall Slack in the ridge of the Pennines, where his parents lived and where his father played ("...For some reason, I found myself just very stirred. Something to do with the time-warp---my father's boyhood, his time on the war (nearly all his football friends killed)---and simply with the joyful, heroic sort of pathos, I suppose, of this little dressed up, brief figures, in that gigantic, archaic, landscape..."), commenting, often at substantial length, on the ideas behind his work, for instance What is the Truth ("...the original idea was---that God's Son should learn about Man by hearing man's account of the creatures he loves best i.e. the creatures he oppresses, mythologises, misuses, kills, eats..."), religion ("...the ultimate field of hypocrisy..."), Christianity ("...Any re-alignment of man to the Natural World and to woman, any restoration of the Natural world and woman to their rightful sanctity, must entail rejection of many attitudes formulated and reinforced by puritan Christianity..."), history, including a four page disquisition on the formative impact of the First World War on his father's generation, the British nation and his own work ("...As the actual survivors...have died off... the country has changed to an incredible degree. What was a shared single, sacred sort of mythology has simply gone..."), his negative views on the teaching of English at Cambridge ("...some very talented people disappeared in the 'psychic cleansing'..."), the misrepresentations of him in the printed media, his dislike of hearing what others think of his work ("...as when a child is admired, in its hearing, for something it does naturally. Ever after – that something is corrupted with self-consciousness..."), his "connection" with the Palaeolithic world ("...all my early years were lived in a dream of being such a hunter..."), his early reading ("...by 18 I was obsessed by Shakespeare and Yeats to the exclusion of almost all else except some music and folklore..."), the difficulty of being Poet Laureate in the "peculiar conditions" in which we live ("...the media proprietors...have located an inexhaustible vein of resentments in the great disaster of our times...the disintegration of the union, the resurgence of old tribal differences..."), covering the genesis, intention and performance of other works such as Crow ("...the Oedipus Song was written to be sung by a gigant