UNSAYABLE

In his brilliantly idiosyncratic essay ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ (1993), Ted Hughes describes a review of his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), by the poet Roy Fuller. Fuller, who was to be Oxford Professor of Poetry between 1968 and 1973, and a governor of the BBC, was a poet of urbane sophistication and irony of a kind Hughes would almost certainly have associated with the poetry against which he was, in his earliest work, implicitly reacting; a reaction he made explicit in early interviews. Citing the final line of his poem ‘The Horses’ – ‘Hearing the horizons endure’ – Hughes observes, ‘When Roy Fuller reviewed the book, which he did in a serious, considerate sort of way, he seized on that last line and pointed out, confidently, that it was “unsayable”.’ And that word subsequently echoes reproachfully throughout this essay. For all the serious consideration, the gentlemanly good behaviour, of Fuller's treatment of the book, Hughes clearly found his confidence a form of condescension; and ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ is a superbly relentless rebuke to the word ‘unsayable’, in which Hughes identifies the English poetic tradition of his own allegiance – the English line behind his own line from ‘The Horses’, as it were – to which Fuller's ear is almost entirely deaf. In fact, our sense of Hughes's reaction is complicated by the knowledge that Fuller's review, although arguably both considerate and condescending, nowhere actually makes this claim about Hughes's line, although it does quote it as one of the book's ‘very bad patches’.