Shamanic Elements in the Poetry of Ted Hughes
Shamanic Elements in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

Author: Ewa Panecka

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-04-18

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 152751031X

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This study on religious experience in modern poetry features innovatory and accessible close readings of some of the most beloved authors of English verse. In today’s seemingly secular age, religion still remains a highly contested subject. The selection of texts analysed here is representative of a wide spectrum of attitudes, including a sharply critical refusal to acknowledge Christianity as the basis of civilization. Some poets see national religion as a framework for cultural identity, while others worship nature as the omnipotent Force of Life, trying to create their own gods. Rather than reducing poetry to a background for philosophical analysis or theological deliberation, this book presents diverse modes of the poetic endeavor to capture and convey the divine. The chapters provide a range of perspectives on individual experience rendered into poetry as a subtle relationship between faith, perception and language. The text will be of interest to anyone looking for new ways of reading poetry as a spiritual guest.

Shamanic Elements in the Poetry of Ted Hughes
Shamanic Elements in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

Author: Ewa Panecka

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 9781527505575

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Shamanism is not a religion, but a technique of achieving ecstasy through chanting, the beating of a drum and the shaking of a rattle, all with the aim of communing with the spirits and rescue afflicted souls. If poetry is a healing substance, poets are shamans of words, who journey into the magic land of art in order to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality. Shamans, the poets of consciousness, can heal the soul and thus lead the reader to spiritual rebirth and moral regeneration. The book interprets the poetry of Ted Hughes as a product of shamanic performance, the work of a mystic and a healerthe Poet Laureate who claimed that England had lost her soul which he proposed to retrieve through veneration of the Gravesian White Goddess, the embodiment of Nature.

The Figure of the Shaman in Contemporary British Poetry
The Figure of the Shaman in Contemporary British Poetry

Author: Shamsad Mortuza

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-08-11

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 144386594X

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This genealogical study focuses on the work of five contemporary British poets in order to locate them in a counter cultural tradition that is informed by strategic responses to ‘state terrorism.’ It identifies some historical moments of ruptures, such as the persecution of the Celtic druids by the Romans, the killing of the Welsh bards by Edward I, the appropriation of bardic materials by Romantic poets writing in a post-French Revolution era, and the beatnik response to a post-World War bipolar world in order to contextualise and discuss the poets of British Poetry Revival writing under Thatcherism. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s notion of shamanism as ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy,’ these poets have transformed Eliade’s version of the shaman’s ‘elective trauma’ and enacted a critical rejection of totalitarian tools of the state and society. Categorised as the ‘Technicians of the Sacred’ and the ‘Technicians of the Body’ these shamanic poets include Iain Sinclair, Jeremy Prynne, Brian Catling, Barry MacSweeney, and Maggie O’Sullivan. Their poetic strategy is not a New Age fad; it rather investigates and inventories the ‘hidden’ energies of past and present to wrest spirituality away from the confines of religion and politics, while embodying it in textual praxis.

The Poetry of Ted Hughes
The Poetry of Ted Hughes

Author: Sandie Byrne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1137310944

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This Reader's Guide charts the reception history of Ted Hughes' poetry from his first to last published collection, culminating in posthumous tributes and assessments of his lifetime achievement. Sandie Byrne explores the criticism relating to key issues such as nature, myth, the Laureateship, and Hughes' relationship with Sylvia Plath.

Ted Hughes' Art of Healing
Ted Hughes' Art of Healing

Author: Daniel Xerri

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13:

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The late Ted Hughes felt that healing was the most fundamental characteristic of all poetry. This study discuss and interprets the healing quality in Hughes' poetic works and evaluates the poet's notion of its significance for human civilization.

Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture
Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture

Author: Neil Roberts

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-29

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 3319975749

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The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes’s proposition that ‘every child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments — political, as well as geographical — which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, ‘the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’.