Ted Hughes’ Inner Music

For a poet so preoccupied, in his essays, letters and interviews, with rhythm and verse music, Hughes’ own poetic rhythms have received strangely little sustained attention. Critics have pointed out his debt to Old and Middle English verse, but considerations of his use of rhythm have too often been limited to isolated comments on single poems, or have sidestepped into vaguer comments about his ‘language’.1 The historical and ideological connotations Hughes attached to rhythm in various essays have also been taken as applying rather too straightforwardly to his own verse, as Neil Roberts has pointed out.2 Hughes wrote eloquently of ‘the peculiar, inner music, the singing ensemble of psychological components, which determines the possibilities of [a poet’s] verse’ (WP 244), but criticism has yet to move beyond the premodern associations and identify more fully what Hughes’ own ‘inner music’ might be, or the extent to which it corresponds with his extra-poetic formulations of ‘musical composition’.3 Doing so brings the distinctive nature of Hughes’ poetry into sharper focus and reveals new aspects of, and new ways of connecting, individual poems and volumes. His inner music, once identified, can serve as an interpretative tool, a gauge by which to measure the shifting pressure of his characteristic preoccupations.