Essay About Ted Hughes And Analysis Of Texts

Conflicting PerspectivesExploring conflicting perspectives helps us gain a better understanding of our world. Do you agree? In your response make particular reference to your personal understanding of this elective.

A perspective is defined as a particular attitude or way of regarding something; a point of view. As individuals, our perspectives differ from each others due to our experiences and the impact of our surroundings and affect the way we live and interact with people and as a result of this, each perspective is as valid as the next, suggesting that there is never one singular, objective truth, but rather a series of perspectives which may or may not conflict. As a result, it is possible to gain a better understanding of our world by considering the often conflicting perspectives of others. This is demonstrated by the analysis of texts involved in the relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. With her mental issues influenced by her father, and his adulterous behaviour, it is easy to see where conflicts may arise. By analysing their respective poetic works, ‘Birthday Letters’ and ‘Daddy’, with different perspectives in mind, it helps us to better understand the situation before applying our own (possibly biased) judgement. By considering perspectives conflicting to ours in our every day lives, it allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the world around us.

The relationship between Hughes and Plath is rather infamous for it’s conflict. Hughes poem to his late wife, entitled ‘The Minotaur’, opens with an accusation directed at Plath. The use of striking visual imagery, “The mahogany table top you smashed”, instantly depicts her as violent and destructive. Plath’s apparent anger is also evident in “The high stool you swung that day, demented by my being twenty minutes late for baby-minding”. Hughes, while admitting he was guilty and the cause of her rage, implies, through use of sibilance, that she was prone to overreacting. Without knowing Plath’s side of the argument, we are left to consider other possible factors that could have contributed to her anger. Why was Hughes late for baby-minding? He was known to be adulterous, potentially the cause of her ‘overreaction’.

In contrast, The Minotaur was a novel, and a literary play. The novel began with Hughes as young as twelve and is set in the year three hundred and fourteen. The novel has a focus on Hughes’ time spent in Ireland and the early times he became involved in a group called ‘The Closer.’ The novel has a strong emotional and visual connection to what is described as an emotional “consequence”; it seems as if the novel was telling the story of another of us all and wanted a sequel to that experience. In this sense the novel is very interesting for its imagery, atmosphere, and plot but not the real one. The novel starts off with a dark picture of Hughes as he is being beaten up by his family members and friends. This seems a logical way to talk about a scene in the book that is reminiscent of how Hughes and many of his ex-wife’s contemporaries view the present tense; it seems that a “solution” is found after Hughes’ murder. But by the time Hughes turns the page, the novel ends and his memory of the time is preserved. In that sense the novel may be the product of an early romantic encounter with Plath, a scene that is much more than just a description of Hughes’ personal life. Plath seems to have developed an intense attachment to Hughes’ writing style. Hughes had long been the subject of many paintings of a young Hughes and the two have developed a friendship. In an interview with the Sydney Observer in 1853 Hughes described Hughes’ time in Ireland as a “haunting adventure and adventure of a man of few words” which the author believed “was of such a high character that it could not exceed the intensity he exhibited on the part of other early lovers of his … . It is also quite clear that he loved and felt himself part of the very human person he was.” Hughes also seemed not to have any qualms about having some of his paintings painted.

The Minotaur can be read as a young Hughes of little renown, and, like some of Hughes’ contemporaries, the novel may have become an object of his erotic fascination. Hughes did write poetry and paintings although he did not appear to own any of his own art or paintings. The character which is identified in this novel, however, is not a simple simple man. Several of Hughes’ early paintings seem to suggest that he had studied and worked from his mother’s home in Dublin to his present place in the country of Ireland. A book, published only in his spare time, describes a young man named Hughes who had an affinity for his artist, whom he thought might be a suitable model for a painter. Several of Hughes’ paintings have been associated with paintings he did not draw. It became clear that Hughes, as is illustrated in the book and has often been speculated about, began drawing his own painted work in the late eighteenth century. The novel describes Hughes as young and beautiful and he writes of him as “the first American poet of the seventeenth century, a young person of considerable stature who had taken many many years to