Ted Hughes, the Goddess and ‘An Alchemy’ | Intellect Skip to content
1981
  1. Home
  2. A-Z Publications
  3. Book 2.0
  4. Volume 13, Issue 2
  5. Article
Volume 13, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 2042-8022
  • E-ISSN: 2042-8030

Abstract

Two of the books Ted Hughes took with him when he worked as a Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter plotter during his two years of compulsory national service, were Robert Graves’s and . Both, he read closely and often. He was already familiar, through his interest in the magical preoccupations of W. B. Yeats, with the philosophy of Hermetic Neoplatonism which had made its way to England during Shakespeare’s time and influenced the work of poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spencer. All of these poets believed in, and used, the alchemical power of poetry which, as Sidney wrote in his , could ‘hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue’. This, and his immersion in Shakespeare’s work (which as Sylvia Plath told her mother, he ‘knew by heart’) led Hughes to discern a developing pattern, based on the transformative powers of the Goddess, through which he believed Shakespeare was performing a complex alchemical process. He expounded this theory in detail in , but almost twenty years earlier he had written the poem ‘An Alchemy’ for a limited edition anthology published in 1973 by the Globe Theatre Trust. ‘An Alchemy’ is a difficult and allusive poem in which nothing is spelled out. In this article, I look at just one section of the poem in which Hughes created his own alchemical matrix through which he sought to reveal the underlying alchemical theme that he saw as the ‘Gold’ in Shakespeare’s work.

© 2023 Intellect Ltd
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/btwo_00087_1
2023-08-31
2024-04-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Ashmole, Elias (1652), ‘Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum’, Public Domain Review, https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/theatrum-chemicum. Accessed 28 June2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Faas, Ekbert (1970), ‘An interview with T. Hughes’, http://www.planetlyrik.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Interview-Egbert-Faas-mit-Ted-Hughes.pdf. Accessed 26 June 2023.
  3. Faas, Ekbert (1980), Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Fawcett, Graham (1973), Poems for Shakespeare 2, London: Globe Theatre Trust.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Hughes, Ted (1971), A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Hughes, Ted (1977), Gaudete, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Hughes, Ted (1978), Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama, New York: Viking.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Hughes, Ted (1979), Remains of Elmet, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Hughes, Ted (1983), River, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Hughes, Ted (ed.) (1991), A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Hughes, Ted (1992), Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Hughes, Ted (1994), Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose (ed. W. Scammell), London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Hughes, Ted (2003), Collected Poems (ed. P. Keegan), London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Hughes, Ted (2007), Letters of Ted Hughes (ed. C. Reid), London: Faber and Faber.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Hughes, Ted (n.d.a), unpublished notes.
  16. Hughes, Ted (n.d.b), Vacanas Notebook: Emory MSS 644, box 57, folder 16, Atlanta, GA: Emory University, https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/hughes644/series2/subseries2.1/. Accessed 23 June 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Jung, Carl G. (1980), Psychology and Alchemy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Numbers 21: 8–12 (1960), The Bible: Authorised Version (ed. J. Stirling), London: The British and Foreign Bible Society.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Sagar, Keith (ed.) (1983), The Achievement of Ted Hughes, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Shakespeare, William (c.1955a), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Shakespeare, William (c.1955b), Venus and Adonis, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Shakespeare, William (c.1955c), The Rape of Lucrece, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Shakespeare, William (c.1955d), Titus Andronicus, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Shakespeare, William (c.1955e), All's Well That Ends Well, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Shakespeare, William (c.1955f), A Winter's Tale, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Shakespeare, William (c.1955g), Measure for Measure, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Shakespeare, William (c.1955h), The Life and Death of King Richard III, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Shakespeare, William (c.1955i), A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Shakespeare, William (c.1955j), King Henry V, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Shakespeare, William (c.1955k), The Merchant of Venice, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Shakespeare, William (c.1955l), Merry Wives of Windsor, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Shakespeare, William (c.1955m), Julius Caesar, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, London: The Selfridge Bookshop.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. Skea, Ann (1994), The Poetic Quest, Armidale: University of New England Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. Wilson, Frances (2004), ‘Testing Ted’, Literary Review, July, pp. 15–16.
     [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/btwo_00087_1
Loading
Ted Hughes, the Goddess and ‘An Alchemy’
Book 2.0 13, 191 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/btwo_00087_1
/content/journals/10.1386/btwo_00087_1
/content/journals/10.1386/btwo_00087_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): alchemy; literary criticism; Neoplatonism; occult; poetry; Robert Graves; Shakespeare; The White Goddess

Most Cited Most Cited RSS feed

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error