Roger Rees (ed.), Ted Hughes and the Classics. Classical Presences. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 348. ISBN 978-0-19-922971-0. $135.00.
From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:
There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or the Antigone — and sees how it has been adapted by later artists. It derives its logic and its focus through a linear genealogy — a sequence of works descended from an original text, interrelating with each other. The second type takes a post-Classical author and sees how this particular artist works with a classical paradigm — Dante’s antiquity, Wagner’s Greeks. It derives its logic and focus in the vision of a single artist, reading antiquity. The third type takes a more general cultural model and explores how classical antiquity has provided models and inspiration in a time in history or in a genre or an artistic movement: the Victorians and ancient Greece; modernism and the classical body. In this case, there is potentially a more diffuse focus and potentially a wider set of cultural questions. The specific problem for contemporary reception studies is how these three models fit together. When looking at the reception of the Antigone (say), how much can the broader vision of any one artist find a place in the analysis? When looking at an individual artist, how much can cultural context or the reception history of a particular text play a part?
Ted Hughes and the Classics is very much a work of type two. It looks at how one artist reads antiquity — adopts, adapts, translates, manipulates the texts of the classical past in his poetry. It has a tight focus, for sure, and one cost of such a focus is that there is very little sense of the wider reception of classics in the twentieth century. Thus we get Ted Hughes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses but very little of how this might fit into a tradition of the reception of Ovid’s epic; Hughes on democracy, but very little on the class and education issues Hughes invokes. You get what it says on the tin: this is “Ted Hughes and the Classics”.
This volume is the seventh or eighth in the Classical Presences series edited by Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. It has already published some exceptional volumes, both in terms of the sheer quality of research and in terms of the interest of the topics. The series has made a name for itself in supporting both monographs and collections of essays on the cutting edge of reception theory — feminism and myth, French political thought and the classics, African version of Greek drama (and so forth). In such a context, this volume, edited by Roger Rees, is rather more conservative in scope and ambition. It looks at Hughes’ works in roughly chronological order, roughly by genre, and discusses his allusions to classical texts, his translations, and his general classicizing techniques.
The authors and titles of the individual chapters:
- Keith Sagar, ‘Ted Hughes and the classics’
- Stuart Gilespie, ‘Hughes’ first translation: ‘The Storm from Homer, OdysseyV’
- Lorna Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama?’
- John Talbot, ‘Eliot’s Seneca, Ted Hughes’ Oedipus‘
- Janna Stigen Drangsholt, ‘Living Myths’.
- Vanda Zajko, ‘”Mutilated towards alignment?”: Prometheus on his Crag and the “Cambridge School” of anthropology’
- Neil Roberts, Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds‘
- Roger Rees, ‘Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the laureate poetry of Ted Hughes’
- Garrett Jacobsen, ‘”A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes and the vates in Tales from Ovid‘
- Anne-Marie Tatham, ‘Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
- Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘The transformations of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
- Genevieve Lively, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’
- Michael Silk, ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic language’
- Hallie Marshall, ‘The Hughes Version: Commercial Considerations and Dramatic Imagination’
- Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation’
- David Gervais, ‘Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides’
