Ted Hughes

What__ writing really about? It__ about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain _ and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.

T.S. Eliot said to me 'There__ only one way a poet can develop his actual writing _ apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud _ and it doesn__ matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it__ in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences _ and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

Right from the start he is dressed in his best - his blacks and his whitesLittle Fauntleroy - quiffed and glossy,A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,Standing in dunged strawUnder cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,Half of him legs, Shining-eyed, requiring nothing moreBut that mother's milk come back often.Everything else is in order, just as it is.Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.This is just as he wants it.A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.Too much and too sudden is too frightening -When I block the light, a bulk from space,To let him in to his mother for a suck,He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,Staring from every hair in all directions,Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,A little syllogismWith a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God's thumb.You see all his hopes bustlingAs he reaches between the worn rails towardsThe topheavy oven of his mother.He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue -What did cattle ever find hereTo make this dear little fellowSo eager to prepare himself?He is already in the race, and quivering to win -His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerksIn the elbowing push of his plans.Hungry people are getting hungrier,Butchers developing expertise and markets,But he just wobbles his tail - and glistensWithin his dapper profileUnaware of how his whole lineage Has been tied up.He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.He is like an ember - one glowOf lighting himself upWith the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.Soon he'll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,To be present at the grass,To be free on the surface of such a wideness,To find himself. To stand. T

Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.

The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldy enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will __hat can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

In those days I coercedOracular assuranceIn my favour out of every sign.

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

Wadsworth MoorWhere the millstone of skyGrinds light and shadow so purple-fineAnd has ground it so longGrinding the skin off the earthEarth bleeds her raw true darknessA land naked now as a woundThat the sun swabs and dabsWhere the miles of agony are numbnessAnd harebell and heather a euphoria