Fulltext

Meta-Mythopoeia in Ted Hughes’s Poetry

فعـل الاسّــطرة المتجاوز لـدى تّــد هــيــوز

Amer Rasool Mahdi عـامـر رسـول مهــدي

Al-Adab Journal مجلة الآداب
ISSN: 1994473X Year: 2017 Issue: 121 Pages: 17-26
Publisher: Baghdad University جامعة بغداد

Abstract

This paper aims at resetting, and delving into, the question of mythmaking or mythopoeia with regard to Ted Hughes’s poetry. It investigates the new postmodernist literary parameters that set Hughes’s mythopoeia apart from the Romantics’ and the modernists’ tradition of mythmaking. With Hughes, this tradition comes to be challenged as it is now reintroduced through the poet’s literary animals, and as these are deemed the correlative of the poetic process that is informed by the postmodernist poetics of meta-literature.Keywords: Ted Hughes; mythopoeia; meta-literature; shamanism.In the vast arena of the modernist literature, and as an offshoot of the romantic concern with mythopoeia, the revival of the mythmaking in the modern times is yet to be revisited through the aesthetic lenses provided by the postmodern sensibilities. A retrospective view of this mythopoetic venture might thus be phrased: while the romantics revert to myths as part of their escapist, yet generative, philosophy and scheme, the modernist poets use them to mythologize their experience that is in accord with the make-it-new1 aesthetics and sensibility in the modern age. The premise of mythologizing for them is to sort out the chaos that characterizes this experience, and to create a sense of order in the disorderly. The mythical component in modernist poetry might be traced back to, and be found poignantly resonant in, W. B. Yeats, the transitional poet who, during his poetic odyssey, makes a heavy use of the Irish folklore and legends until he lapses into the occult traditions, ending up mythologizing history

ترمي هذه الدراسة الى اعادة طرح مسألة الاسّـطـرة والخوض فيها بقدر تعلق الامر بشعر تّـد هيـوز. اذ تعمد الدراسة الى الخوض في الاشتراطات ما بعد الحداثية التي تجعل من فعل الاسطّرة لدى هيوز مغايرا لما سواه لدى الرومانسيين والحداثيين. ان فعل التجاوز لدى الشاعر يتمثل باقحامه لكائناته الادبية بوصف هذه الاخيرة معادلا للعملية الشعرية التي اخذت توسم بطابع الاشتراط ما بعد الحداثي لما وراء الادب.