Subjetividade e dualismo homem-animal em The Jaguar, de Ted Hughes

Este trabalho objetivou traçar um paralelo e estabelecer uma conversa entre os dualismos de homem e animal. Para que esta discussão se articulasse dentro do campo literário, escolhemos como objeto de pesquisa o poema The Jaguar (1957), de Ted Hughes. Iniciamos nossa discussão passando pelos princípios narrativos poéticos e estabelecemos uma conexão entre os estudos de Descartes e Heidegger, filósofos que discutem os animais e a animalidade. Para além disso, discutimos a historicidade do autor e analisamos o poema de Hughes a partir da perspectiva do olhar e do aprisionamento animal e a relação dialética entre seres humanos e não-humanos; a partir dessa reflexão, tecemos novos olhares para a subjetividade animal.

Birthday Letters

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.

The Alvarez Generation

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.

In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn

This chapter focuses on literary journalist A. Alvarez and his views on the work of Thom Gunn. Alvarez, who was appointed poetry editor of the Observer in 1956, was primarily an academic through much of the 1950s. He studied and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R. P. Blackmur. His university posts resulted in two critical books aimed largely at an academic audience: The Shaping Spirit (1958) about the poetry of English and American modernism, and The School of Donne (1960) on the metaphysical poets. Alvarez was initially an admirer of Gunn, who was as Donnean poet as he could have wished for. He would later change his mind, claiming that ‘apart from a handful of early poems, Gunn has never shown much interest in the style of exacerbated intensity that attracted his Cambridge contemporary, Ted Hughes’.