This chapter provides an account of the georgic in modern and contemporary poetry. It begins by illuminating the georgic qualities, however implicit or accidental, in Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary, and proceeds to trace the influence of Hughes’s farming poems on the work of his literary contemporaries and successors, including poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald and Sean Borodale. Locating the georgic in the margins and tattered edges of poems – and the working landscapes they describe – it argues that the agricultural and horticultural poetry of these writers represents if not a georgic revival then at least evidence of its survival in the wake of profound changes in agriculture and the British countryside. The particular strain of the georgic that is sustained by these poets is characterised by a documentary style which remains alive to the haphazard circumstances of outdoor work – a style which is as adaptable as it is enduring.

This chapter examines the crucial place education occupied in Heaney’s professional experience and literary imagination. His ruminations on teaching and learning in both poetry and prose open up personal, social, pedagogical, and political questions which grant us a richer understanding of the institutional and intellectual forces which shaped his thinking. The chapter begins by acknowledging Heaney’s beginnings as a schoolteacher in Belfast in the 1960s, and the work he undertook for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service with his friend David Hammond in the 1970s. His collaboration with another friend, Ted Hughes, on the celebrated Faber anthologies The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997), and his later recollections of this work, are central to this argument, revealing complex and generationally specific convictions about the practices of reading, writing, and teaching, from which we may yet have much to learn.

In 1962, the critic Philip Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast to take up a teaching position in the English Department at Queen’s University. He came with an impressive array of literary connections. At Cambridge, he had studied with F.R. Leavis, edited the literary magazine delta, and befriended Ted Hughes. Later, in London, he chaired a weekly writing group, dubbed 'the Group', whose members included Edward Lucie-Smith, Alan Brownjohn, George MacBeth, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, David Wevill and Peter Porter, among others. These were some of the most prominent young poets and critics in England; such contacts would prove valuable when Hobsbaum convened another literary group in Belfast, where he assembled equally talented, if less confident, young writers. This chapter explores the connections between British and Northern Irish poetry in the early 1960s, and argues that the 'Belfast Group' was a crucial launching pad for the fledgling Belfast poetry scene and the success of one Belfast poet in particular: Seamus Heaney.

This chapter uses archival material connected to the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain to reconstruct three performances of ancient tragedy in the first decade of its existence, from 1963 to 1973. The productions of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (1963), Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), and Euripides’ Bacchae (1973) each highlight different elements of the British theatre company’s investment in performing ancient Greek and Roman tragedies in this period. Archival material allows the researcher to plot performative trajectories which combine the personal investments of world-renowned artists and theatre professionals like Ted Hughes, Peter Brook, and Wole Soyinka with the angry responses of audience members and the anxious fears of the theatre company. By bringing to light a body of ephemeral evidence including letters, memos, accounts of meetings, telegrams, theatrical programmes, production notes, and stage managers’ reports, the resulting performative reconstructions go beyond the text of the play and bear vivid witness to the powerful emotions and cathexes that ensure the continued popularity of ancient tragedy on the modern stage.

Seamus Heaney used his Dublin attic for most of his mature writing years as both a writing space and a warehouse. The poet’s correspondence was acquired in 2003 by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University. His journals and drafts of published works were donated to the National Library of Ireland in 2011. The Heaney archives are a treasure trove of historical and literary documents that have the power to re-energize, refocus and resituate Heaney studies around the world. The theoretical implications and critical potential of the archival materials become clear when one traces the paper-trail of the archives from the pre-natal attic to the postmortem reading room and into the afterlife of textual studies.

Andrew Walker writes from the premise that one of Plath’s most notable characteristics is her sense of the dramatic, her experimentation with multiple voices and personas. Walker establishes Plath’s long-held interest in radio drama growing up in America, and the impact of contemporary radio dramas and BBC’s the Third Programme on her work. Plath’s radio play, Three Women, is influenced by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as well as Ted Hughes’s A Houseful of Women and The Wound, which appear during key phases in Plath’s poetic development. Walker accounts for a dramatic shift between Plath’s earlier and later work, and demonstrates the importance of an oft-overlooked, yet highly vital, poetic context.

Elaine Feinstein provides an expert and first-hand account of Plath’s last months in London, which spans her search for a flat in November of 1962 and her final move to the city in December of that year. This is the period during which Plath wrote her final poems, and Feinstein’s biography of Plath’s time in London help us to understand better the context out of which these poems emerged.

Richard Kerridge describes the literary, cultural and scientific context of Plath’s interest in wild animals, landscape, climate and pollution. The letters and journals show that this interest was intense, but also that it was not scientific or systematic, even in a rudimentary way. Plath’s strategy was to preserve the dramatic immediacy of unexpected encounters with wildlife, rather than frame those encounters with scientific information. Nevertheless, an emergent ecological consciousness and environmental concern are evident in her writing. Kerridge provides the historical and scientific background for this concern, by outlining the major conceptual shifts that were taking place in ecological science, the recent history of wild nature in literature, and some of the changing popular attitudes in Britain and the USA.

The poet and academic Sarah Corbett reveals Plath’s profound response to Yorkshire’s powerful and often threatening natural and human landscape, as well as to the writings of Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes. In a handful of poems, Plath can be heard sounding out a Hughesian strain of voice against the ghosts and rumoured angels of her own emergent poetic imagination. These West Yorkshire interludes show Plath making use of an ambivalent energy in the landscape to mirror her self/psyche, a technique that can be seen in many of the Ariel poems, and the beginnings of a working out of the struggle between masculine and feminine voices that was to underpin much of her mature work.

Spending equal time with Hughes’s poetry, especially Birthday Letters, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, this chapter examines how the Christological ideas at work in so much of Hughes’s other poetry applies to the life, literary output and tragic death of his first wife. We watch as the Edenic template of the fall repeats in Hughes’s depictions of Plath. Close attention is also paid to Plath’s “Pursuit,” with additional contributions from Yeats and Stevens, setting up a pattern of continual intertextuality. Plath’s foundering efforts to manage and restore her unfallen, divine self produce a range of fascinating effects in both her writing and Hughes’s. These particularly center on a body of landscape poetry written during the couple’s two-year stay in America, and reference is made to the work of artists Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The most explicitly Christological of Hughes’s Birthday Letters poems are discussed, and the argument made that his efforts to understand what happened to Plath in terms of a “symbolic death and rebirth” send him continually, though never with total satisfaction, to the Christian template.

This introductory chapter opens with a look at Frances Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion, which a 32 year-old Hughes describes in a letter. His fascination with this painting leads us to basic questions about Hughes’s attitude toward religious thought and language. This begins with the problem of the word “God”: what the word means, how theologians use it, and how Hughes uses it in the poetry of his first two books. This leads to a summary of the existing critical consensus on Hughes’s relationship with Christianity, and opening remarks in preparing a refutation of this consensus. Moving on to Hughes’s third book, Wodwo, discussion focuses on the poem “Logos,” where the superficial cultural mockery of Hughes’s earlier “God” poems begins to mature into a more genuine engagement with the concepts of God and Christ, albeit an engagement fuelled by persona-driven irony, gesturing toward the Crow project.

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.

Departing momentarily from the soteriological arc of fall-crucifixion-redemption, this chapter tackles a range of cultural topics centred around the Protestant Reformation, a historical development about which Hughes expresses repeated regret. Much of this chapter is concerned with bridging the symbolic worlds of Robert Graves’s White Goddess, which Hughes emphatically embraces, with the Christian metaphysical world discussed in this book. With reference to Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary and Hughes’s own great work of critical prose, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, our discussion teases out the complicated relationship between Graves’s Goddess and Christian figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Hughes’s particular disdain for Puritanism, which he read as a systematic rejection of the Goddess, is explored, leading to explorations of Marian symbolism in Gaudete and the provocatively religious language of Remains of Elmet, incorporating a history of the Primitive Methodist Church, the religion of Hughes’s earliest childhood in the Calder Valley.

The book begins its soteriological arc with a discussion of the fall as it operates in Hughes’s work: not merely as a playful trope, but as an ontological truth of the human condition. Presenting self-regard as the primary Hughesian symptom of fallenness, this chapter discusses key early poems before arguing that the poem “Wodwo,” with its depiction of a creature crouched in negotiations with a lost divine life, holds a place of greater significance in Hughes’s canon than critical attention has so far granted. Discussion turns to Hughes’s essay “Baboons and Neanderthals: a Rereading of The Inheritors,” in which Hughes attempts to marry scripture to science by suggesting that human fallenness is the result of a mutation in our evolutionary history. The chapter engages heavily with the work of paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould (who Hughes himself read) to demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of Hughes’s theorising. Hughes discusses the biological fall in relation to William Golding’s novel, but here we are able to see Hughes’s own deployments of the idea.

This chapter return to the soteriological arc with a discussion of sacramental imagery and aspirations of redemption and transcendence. Beginning with the Gaudete Epilogue poems and moving on River and Under the North Star, it looks at the rise in sacramental and specifically eucharistic imagery in Hughes’s poetry, arguing that the naturalization of sacramental activity in these poems authenticates human religious concerns. Sympathies between Hughes’s work and that of the American Transcendentalist, hinted at here there so far in the book, are discussed explicitly. Also making significant reference to Eliot, this chapter discusses the question of time in Hughes’s poetry, where, especially in River, it appears as something to be resisted and potentially escaped or transcended. The chapter culminates in a close reading of the poems “That Morning” and “The River.” We watch as Hughes overcomes anxieties about the destructive nature of time by cleaving ever closer to an explicitly Christian metaphysic.

The central symbolic event of the Christian religion appears everywhere in Hughes’s poetry and prose, explicitly and implicitly, as a fundamental metaphysical statement about the human condition. This chapter begins with a discussion of “Hawk in the Rain,” the opening and title poem of Hughes’s first collection, as an update of Hopkin’s explicitly Christological poem “The Windhover,” which leads to a consideration of how the crucifixion has been made less horrific over the years through the use of comforting cultural “roses.” Making much use of the theologian Paul Tillich, this chapter introduces the concept of teleological freedom, of which the crucifixion is a powerful representation, not least in Hughes’s poetry. Key crufixional Crow poems, especially “Crow Blacker Than Ever,” are discussed, and the prevailing critical reading overturned. The chapter concludes with a theological and literary look at Jesus’ death-cry, an act which echoes repeatedly in Hughes’s work.

The book concludes with a look at Hughes’s use of the word “glimpse,” a word he adopts as an unassuming shorthand for moments of direct contact with God.