1 00:00:11,380 --> 00:00:21,280 Good evening, and thank you for joining us this evening for this evening's lecture given by the professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:21,280 --> 00:00:26,170 Alice Oswald. My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director of Torch. 3 00:00:26,170 --> 00:00:32,170 The Oxford Research Centre of the Humanities Torch is delighted to be able to be collaborating with 4 00:00:32,170 --> 00:00:37,720 the English faculty in hosting this evening's lecture as part of our live event series itself, 5 00:00:37,720 --> 00:00:46,000 part of the Humanities Cultural Programme. One of the founding signs for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 6 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:51,430 Alice has kindly agreed to take questions from the audience tonight, so if you do have any questions, 7 00:00:51,430 --> 00:00:56,800 please put them in the YouTube chat below, and we'll do our very best to answer as many as we can. 8 00:00:56,800 --> 00:01:00,000 At the end of the discussion. 9 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:07,020 It's now my great pleasure to welcome, first of all, Professor Ross Bannister to tell us more about the lecture this evening. 10 00:01:07,020 --> 00:01:11,730 And it's Ross who'll be chairing the discussions as well as the lecture. 11 00:01:11,730 --> 00:01:21,520 Ross Bannister is professor of 18th-Century Studies Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College and the chair of the English Faculty Board. 12 00:01:21,520 --> 00:01:25,950 She's published widely on the novel and on women's writing in the 18th century, 13 00:01:25,950 --> 00:01:30,930 and is currently writing a book about the role of theatre in the invention of the novel. 14 00:01:30,930 --> 00:01:37,410 Ross, thank you so much for the Professor of Poetry lecture. Thank you for being with us this evening! 15 00:01:37,410 --> 00:01:42,060 And without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you and disappear from the screens now. 16 00:01:42,060 --> 00:01:51,570 Thank you. Thanks very much. With so, I'm delighted to introduce Professor Alison Oswald Alexis A46, 17 00:01:51,570 --> 00:01:56,880 professor of poetry at the University of Oxford since the Post was founded in 1788. 18 00:01:56,880 --> 00:02:04,050 The list, in line of her publications, is long and distinguished from the thing in the gaps and style of 1996, 19 00:02:04,050 --> 00:02:09,030 which received a forward poetry prise for best first collection through dart to Woods, 20 00:02:09,030 --> 00:02:18,840 etc. Weeds and wildflowers asleep woke on the seven memorial falling awake, nobody and a short story of falling. 21 00:02:18,840 --> 00:02:27,810 Her most recent publication of Twenty Ninth of October from Jonathan Cape is Gigantic Cinema, a weather anthology co-edited with Paul Keegan. 22 00:02:27,810 --> 00:02:32,730 Characteristically, the anthology challenges the conventional form of the anthology, 23 00:02:32,730 --> 00:02:37,410 charting a temporal line as its poets and poems from all different worlds and periods 24 00:02:37,410 --> 00:02:43,230 scan the skies and the Earth in response to changing and changeable weather. 25 00:02:43,230 --> 00:02:49,590 We, too, are travelling with Alice Oswald along a temporal and geospatial line. 26 00:02:49,590 --> 00:02:53,280 The professor of poetry gives a public lecture each time. 27 00:02:53,280 --> 00:03:01,170 This is Alice Oswald's third public lecture, and her second delivered through virtual means and zoomed into your homes. 28 00:03:01,170 --> 00:03:08,490 As those of you who attended her last talk will remember, there's actually nothing virtual about the experience we have as listeners. 29 00:03:08,490 --> 00:03:18,630 Alice's lectures take us on visceral sound journeys with her voice, the voices of other poets and the sounds of the natural and the unnatural world. 30 00:03:18,630 --> 00:03:27,330 They make us here what we've forgotten to hear, and she could have chosen no more appropriate poetry to discuss today in that regard. 31 00:03:27,330 --> 00:03:36,150 The perch you she's in conversation with today is that of Ted Hughes. It's 50 years since the publication of From the Life and Songs of Crow. 32 00:03:36,150 --> 00:03:42,330 Alice Oswald has described elsewhere her sense of finding in Hughes's poetic lines 33 00:03:42,330 --> 00:03:49,140 what she calls a compulsory in a music outwith the presence of rhyme and metre. 34 00:03:49,140 --> 00:03:56,190 And others have recognised her affinity with Hughes. Alice Oswald was the recipient of the inaugural Ted Hughes Award, 35 00:03:56,190 --> 00:04:04,830 founded by Carol Ann Duffy for new work in poetry for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers, published in 2009. 36 00:04:04,830 --> 00:04:13,450 Duffy commented then that Alice Oswald of all poets working today is possibly the most like Hughes. 37 00:04:13,450 --> 00:04:20,380 I know Alice herself will have much more to tell us about this relationship and its lineage for her in her lecture today. 38 00:04:20,380 --> 00:04:26,960 So I am very pleased to hand over to Professor Alice Oswald for her lecture on lines. 39 00:04:26,960 --> 00:04:33,750 Thank you very much. It's. And hello to everybody. 40 00:04:33,750 --> 00:04:42,760 Lines is hard to deliver a poetry lecture poem, at least the kind of poem I like is not an opinion. 41 00:04:42,760 --> 00:04:48,550 A poem is a way of speaking into silence to see what to expect. 42 00:04:48,550 --> 00:04:55,210 Often what speaks back is contradictory and even stupefying, but a true poem won't flinch at that. 43 00:04:55,210 --> 00:05:04,500 A true poem gives up its knowingness at the end of each line inhales, listens and then starts again. 44 00:05:04,500 --> 00:05:13,820 A lecture, on the other hand, ought to know what it thinks the lecture should convey what it thinking remote and stupefied or contradicted. 45 00:05:13,820 --> 00:05:15,590 I should like to deliver that kind of lecture, 46 00:05:15,590 --> 00:05:27,610 but I need to warn you that because of my long training in the art of not knowing there will be some sharp turns and contradictions. 47 00:05:27,610 --> 00:05:34,460 Just trying to scroll down. This is the first shot at a contradiction. 48 00:05:34,460 --> 00:05:38,540 I should like to speak about contemporary poetry and by contemporary, 49 00:05:38,540 --> 00:05:45,680 I mean something right now unmistakeably alive as I cast about for something light sensitive, 50 00:05:45,680 --> 00:05:52,730 love sensitive, strongly self expressive and self renewing, but also piercing and fragmentary. 51 00:05:52,730 --> 00:05:58,980 And I thought the first example I can think of is the Blackbird. 52 00:05:58,980 --> 00:06:05,090 Some people prefer the great poet who speaks and language, adding one thought to another. 53 00:06:05,090 --> 00:06:09,250 But I prefer the bird who speaks in lines. 54 00:06:09,250 --> 00:06:18,550 I'm told by Bashir that the Blackbird learnt it song from running water, and I can see the similarity, but water, when you sleep, listening to it. 55 00:06:18,550 --> 00:06:23,920 Water goes on and on beyond even the great fit out, obvious intervals or endings. 56 00:06:23,920 --> 00:06:46,780 Whereas what I love about the Blackbird is its. 57 00:06:46,780 --> 00:06:50,890 In Stevie Wishart slowed down version, picked out on a guitar. 58 00:06:50,890 --> 00:07:00,970 You hear the simple beauty of Blackbird grandma. One quick statement to pursue to the point of amazement, then of silence lost that. 59 00:07:00,970 --> 00:07:07,390 Then it speaks again, a slightly different statement that skewed to the point of amazement than a silence. 60 00:07:07,390 --> 00:07:15,260 Then again? It is lovely to stand near a tree in the evening and here halting way of speaking, 61 00:07:15,260 --> 00:07:20,870 letting it small system of statements against a vast system of intervals. 62 00:07:20,870 --> 00:07:26,640 Phrases outlined by Portage, that is what I call poetry. 63 00:07:26,640 --> 00:07:36,630 Each new phrase fix itself to each new moment. That is what I call contemporary. 64 00:07:36,630 --> 00:07:43,980 I'm going to speak today about that kind of contemporary poetry, and my focus is a book still unmistakeably alive, 65 00:07:43,980 --> 00:07:51,060 even though it was originally published 50 years ago from the Life and Songs of The Crow by Ted Hughes. 66 00:07:51,060 --> 00:07:54,240 He called his quote epic, the no light, 67 00:07:54,240 --> 00:08:02,930 rude medical unfinished poem written to accompany the drawings of Leonard asking which you should be able to see. 68 00:08:02,930 --> 00:08:08,390 It might seem perverse to speak about crude in terms of weapons, but when I first encountered that book, 69 00:08:08,390 --> 00:08:15,140 I was looking for something that was not the structure of that photo. And I fell in love with cronuts. 70 00:08:15,140 --> 00:08:26,800 Poem made beautifully, even black badly of lines, although of course, the tune of its thought pattern is pure crude. 71 00:08:26,800 --> 00:08:29,960 Irwin, the birds. 72 00:08:29,960 --> 00:08:41,130 When the eagle soared clear through a drone distilling of Emerald, when the curlew trawled inside us through a chain of wine glasses. 73 00:08:41,130 --> 00:08:48,760 When the swallow swooped through a woman's song in a cabin. And the swift flipped through the breadth of the violent. 74 00:08:48,760 --> 00:08:56,480 When the old sailed clear of moral conscience, the Sparrow preen himself with yesterday's promise. 75 00:08:56,480 --> 00:09:03,950 And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer Upland and the Bluetooth zip clear of lace panties and the 76 00:09:03,950 --> 00:09:12,060 woodpecker drummed clear of the road data and the road volume and the P with tumbled fear of the laundromat. 77 00:09:12,060 --> 00:09:19,200 While the bull finch clumped in the Apple bat and the Goldfinch bowled in the Sun. 78 00:09:19,200 --> 00:09:27,000 And the Reineke cooked in the moon and the dipper peered from the Dubal. 79 00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:38,620 Crews battled head down in the beach, garbage dazzling, dropped ice cream. 80 00:09:38,620 --> 00:09:44,950 And tax is as direct as a crow flies, the tone is as barefaced. 81 00:09:44,950 --> 00:09:52,300 There are no words, Hugh said. The words to capture the infinite depth of craziness in the Crows flight, 82 00:09:52,300 --> 00:09:59,020 the ominous thing in the Crows flight, the barefaced, undercutting the tattered agony Dixie thing, 83 00:09:59,020 --> 00:10:03,940 the caressing and shaping and yet slightly clumsy gesture of the diamond stroke, 84 00:10:03,940 --> 00:10:08,890 as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful and headlong sort of merriment. 85 00:10:08,890 --> 00:10:17,220 The macabre pantomime bullishness and the undertaker sleepiness. 86 00:10:17,220 --> 00:10:23,020 You took on that gesture, put on that mask that you can see from this photo. 87 00:10:23,020 --> 00:10:29,320 He combined the inward mythological crowd and the outward untidy, but into a new kind of poetry. 88 00:10:29,320 --> 00:10:32,700 And he did so I need a melody. 89 00:10:32,700 --> 00:10:41,160 The melody controlled the selection of words, he said the special function of the melody is the only low to the language of Chrome. 90 00:10:41,160 --> 00:10:47,870 The special function of the melody is the only law with the language of. 91 00:10:47,870 --> 00:10:54,370 Tattered, clumsy, powerful, macabre. There are plenty of ways to describe the pro-military. 92 00:10:54,370 --> 00:10:59,230 But its defining quality as far as I'm concerned, is delineation. 93 00:10:59,230 --> 00:11:10,420 It is a tune up by June of Chunk thought this June direct transit rated as in growing the birds with its peak of scanning lines, 94 00:11:10,420 --> 00:11:20,160 each line a musical shift, each shift a new bird and each bird at Hopkins might say, so goes itself. 95 00:11:20,160 --> 00:11:29,830 The last line. It's got a rotation note crows Brattle head down in the beach, garbage rustling dropped ice cream. 96 00:11:29,830 --> 00:11:34,040 Which arrives beyond the court frame, like the 15th line, 97 00:11:34,040 --> 00:11:41,650 the sonnet that is by and large and Lydia of all the crow poems on which just seem to add 98 00:11:41,650 --> 00:11:48,940 up and add up poems which seemed to grow like forms or footprints in repeating patterns. 99 00:11:48,940 --> 00:12:01,410 They come in lists, in roads, in bursts, in the compositional unit is the line, and the last line generally went to in the face. 100 00:12:01,410 --> 00:12:04,500 If you compare Milton's list of birds in Paradise Lost, 101 00:12:04,500 --> 00:12:11,790 you can hear the difference between a melody that organises fixed impressions and one that reflects the. 102 00:12:11,790 --> 00:12:17,900 Uses birds land that like the syntax, which listen and sends it back. 103 00:12:17,900 --> 00:12:30,220 Milton's birds float on his voice over the lions and cannot land until the grammar has blown itself out. 104 00:12:30,220 --> 00:12:36,100 They're the eagle and the stork on cliffs that sit atop that area, areas built. 105 00:12:36,100 --> 00:12:46,840 Pot loosely wing, the region got more wide in common range in figure which their way intelligent of seasons and set forth that area Caribbean. 106 00:12:46,840 --> 00:12:53,120 I see flying and overland mutual wing eating their flight. 107 00:12:53,120 --> 00:13:04,730 So it is the prudent crane, her annual voyage going on went the air float as they pass and with unnumbered food from branch to branch, 108 00:13:04,730 --> 00:13:10,340 the smaller birds with song sort of the woods and spread their painted wings of Eden more. 109 00:13:10,340 --> 00:13:22,610 Then the solemn Nightingale ceased warbling, but all night tune herself played. 110 00:13:22,610 --> 00:13:28,340 Milton Blind Recital poet throwing long sentences across confusion. 111 00:13:28,340 --> 00:13:35,090 I have to be careful here. I have described Milton's syntax as a way of ordering his impressions. 112 00:13:35,090 --> 00:13:39,830 How can anyone know what Milton saw inside his darkness? 113 00:13:39,830 --> 00:13:45,380 Milton is one of those poets for whom thought was perceived actuality. 114 00:13:45,380 --> 00:13:52,250 He saw the movement of justice as someone else might be the movement of the wind or the outside. 115 00:13:52,250 --> 00:14:01,190 Nevertheless, the effect of his run over lines is that every chord is either made, written or mid-sentence to read. 116 00:14:01,190 --> 00:14:13,910 Milton is the caught in the continuity. It is what Hughes elsewhere called either the carrier wave or the great plastic megaphone mask the English. 117 00:14:13,910 --> 00:14:22,280 By the time of writing the poems, Hughes had replaced the megaphone the crow mask, but in his earlier collections in some of his loveliest, 118 00:14:22,280 --> 00:14:35,940 most conflicted poems, he was still struggling to lift himself of that thinking tone of voice. 119 00:14:35,940 --> 00:14:48,270 Desires a vicious separator in spite of it, twisting women around men, code chisels to sell single as it melts hot iron of their separates to one. 120 00:14:48,270 --> 00:14:59,700 Owed Eden commonplace, something magnets and furnaces, and with this hammer blow to one body on the other, it's still the division disappears. 121 00:14:59,700 --> 00:15:06,810 But desire outstrips those hands that are nothing, so it dives into the opposite. 122 00:15:06,810 --> 00:15:12,970 Plummet through not out to impossible with the star that liked the food. 123 00:15:12,970 --> 00:15:24,150 Each body still straining to follow down the maelstrom, dark of the other, their limbs flail flesh and beat upon the inane everywhere of obstacle. 124 00:15:24,150 --> 00:15:31,170 Each each second, no new and further falling alone through the endless without well to the other, 125 00:15:31,170 --> 00:15:44,640 though both here twist so close they joke that cries. 126 00:15:44,640 --> 00:15:49,440 We've been taught to cool kids how to balance and reach a man. 127 00:15:49,440 --> 00:15:55,050 But it's worth noticing here what a sensitivity he has for complex syntax. 128 00:15:55,050 --> 00:16:02,580 The sentences in this poem and belt line in there are thought thrown from one side of the page to the other. 129 00:16:02,580 --> 00:16:09,040 So that whole piece is entitled Pooped and Keystone into a breath cathedral. 130 00:16:09,040 --> 00:16:12,760 He trained his sentences under the pros of Jonathan Swift. 131 00:16:12,760 --> 00:16:19,360 He used to set his students the task of copying out a sentence of Swift with their own idea of substitutes. 132 00:16:19,360 --> 00:16:24,870 He spoke of his wish to learn the whole of twist by heart. I love that fact. 133 00:16:24,870 --> 00:16:33,040 It reminds me and I alert this observation that the sentence forms forced on land by nature itself. 134 00:16:33,040 --> 00:16:42,430 If you is a nature poet, that is partly to do with his sharp hearing of grammar, although his later style is made of separate insubordinate clauses. 135 00:16:42,430 --> 00:16:49,180 He never lost sight of the tiny support and movements that make up the ecology of language. 136 00:16:49,180 --> 00:16:55,690 But keep it in mind. Hughes composed his tunes out of varying pictures of English syntax. 137 00:16:55,690 --> 00:17:05,260 That is what is distinctive about his so-called free verse, whereas most free verse or use line breaks to undermine the grammar you choose. 138 00:17:05,260 --> 00:17:14,500 Sings emphatically and phrases its grammar is his melody, and therefore his musical silence is also a semantic silence. 139 00:17:14,500 --> 00:17:24,520 More of that later. Hughes's first book, Walk in the Rain, was well-received by almost everyone, except Hughes himself, 140 00:17:24,520 --> 00:17:30,560 who was immediately dissatisfied as if his voice had proved inadequate for his vision. 141 00:17:30,560 --> 00:17:39,500 His voice had made a lyric well, clothed and fixed, but his vision was of something more alive and open as he later summed it up. 142 00:17:39,500 --> 00:17:47,630 Describing his first two collections, I had made a language only by locating it in its lifeless or comatose. 143 00:17:47,630 --> 00:17:56,350 Obedience. Hughes adopted multiple strategies to grow the and Don invented two characters with different voices, 144 00:17:56,350 --> 00:18:00,700 he experimented with short stories and short plays here and there. 145 00:18:00,700 --> 00:18:11,600 He began to try out a kind of diary poem in which he could wrap it, diversify any experience simply by allowing new lines for each new impression. 146 00:18:11,600 --> 00:18:29,220 In his second collection, partly inspired by that, sir, it's time to put sound he wanted, and he recognised the breakthrough instantly. 147 00:18:29,220 --> 00:18:34,770 I sit in the top of the world. My eyes closed in action. 148 00:18:34,770 --> 00:18:41,490 No falsifying dream between my hooked head and hooked feet or in sleep. 149 00:18:41,490 --> 00:18:46,500 Rehearse perfect pills and eat. 150 00:18:46,500 --> 00:18:58,540 The convenience of the high street, the Air's buoyancy and the sun ray of advantage to me and the Earth face upward for my inspection. 151 00:18:58,540 --> 00:19:06,640 My feet are locked on the rough bow. It took the whole of creation to produce my foot like each other. 152 00:19:06,640 --> 00:19:14,120 Now I hold creation in my foot. Or fly up and reveal that all slowly. 153 00:19:14,120 --> 00:19:23,680 I kill what I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body, my manners are tearing off heads. 154 00:19:23,680 --> 00:19:31,060 The allotment of death. But the one part of my flight is direct through the bones of the living. 155 00:19:31,060 --> 00:19:37,030 No arguments assert my right. The Sun is behind me. 156 00:19:37,030 --> 00:19:43,400 Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. 157 00:19:43,400 --> 00:19:57,940 I am going to keep things like this. Hughes described writing that poem as a most intense pleasure. 158 00:19:57,940 --> 00:20:08,080 His aim, as he expressed it several years later, was to achieve the greatest possible musical shift between Inflexion and in achieving it. 159 00:20:08,080 --> 00:20:10,930 He felt he had broken the sound barrier. 160 00:20:10,930 --> 00:20:23,470 What an image, as if the pace of his voice had been outstripped as if his most area had lifted and let something out or in. 161 00:20:23,470 --> 00:20:32,200 To attribute hawk roosting with all its savagery and perspective to a new understanding of the line might seem overly technical, 162 00:20:32,200 --> 00:20:38,510 but poems enter and alter the imagination, but it's simple sonic means. 163 00:20:38,510 --> 00:20:43,760 I have noticed myself if I write in rhyming couplets and take a break and go for a walk. 164 00:20:43,760 --> 00:20:47,180 Well arranges itself into matching pads. 165 00:20:47,180 --> 00:20:55,340 I find myself looking at symmetrical seeds, trees with their shadows to and fro, birdcalls side by side footprint. 166 00:20:55,340 --> 00:21:00,740 If I'm using six eighths on it form well, teams full of interwoven patterns. 167 00:21:00,740 --> 00:21:10,490 I'm more driven to observe flowers when writing formal births and counter more to provide more movement when I'm writing free verse. 168 00:21:10,490 --> 00:21:20,720 When Freebirds opposes it, malady by speaking over the line and then I seem to move around inside a warm blonde voice that let no draughted. 169 00:21:20,720 --> 00:21:28,760 But if I write in lines and in fact, I frequently start by opening up this line, drawing exercise of pool play, 170 00:21:28,760 --> 00:21:38,030 then I begin to notice the active intervals between things as if the world is a range of propositions which abruptly stop. 171 00:21:38,030 --> 00:21:44,070 And each time they stock, the code gets into the mind. 172 00:21:44,070 --> 00:21:45,420 The structure of hawk rousting, 173 00:21:45,420 --> 00:21:53,460 whose lines follow drastically after each other and whose causes are true causes which keep remaking the tune as far as I can see, 174 00:21:53,460 --> 00:22:00,390 that structure turned hues from a lyric or inflected vision to an epic or afflicted one. 175 00:22:00,390 --> 00:22:07,510 It is, in effect, the prologue poem to his folk epic from. 176 00:22:07,510 --> 00:22:13,360 What you said about closed an open university to choose writing a letter in 1968, 177 00:22:13,360 --> 00:22:18,670 what you said about closed and open universe was a shrewd and penetrating a remark 178 00:22:18,670 --> 00:22:24,570 as I shall hear about the change in my words from Luke account to what were. 179 00:22:24,570 --> 00:22:34,510 Openness. That is what Hughes valued and work towards openness to whatever was out, there were a light or dark or material or mythical. 180 00:22:34,510 --> 00:22:44,080 The claim he put forward right from the start in various letters and essays was that mainstream poetry had closed itself off and sealed itself in. 181 00:22:44,080 --> 00:22:50,560 His ambition was by means of melody. And that's why many years later, he said of the poems. 182 00:22:50,560 --> 00:22:58,290 There were times when I really felt my bones open, and the best footnote to that remark is real good. 183 00:22:58,290 --> 00:23:04,910 It's doing a elegy. 184 00:23:04,910 --> 00:23:15,600 With all that eyes, all creatures see the open only our eyes are turned around and surrounded with gold all round the way to be free. 185 00:23:15,600 --> 00:23:23,970 What is outside? We know from animal lives alone, since even the youngest child, we can run full tilt backwards to see conformity, 186 00:23:23,970 --> 00:23:31,350 not openness so deep in an animal face free from that, which is what only we see. 187 00:23:31,350 --> 00:23:35,670 Every animal has its origin always behind it and got in front. 188 00:23:35,670 --> 00:23:39,990 And when it moves, it moves an eternity away to bring drum. 189 00:23:39,990 --> 00:23:45,870 We never not even one single day of pure space in front of us into it. 190 00:23:45,870 --> 00:23:50,700 The flowers endlessly arrive. Always, it is world mother. 191 00:23:50,700 --> 00:24:07,480 Nothing without the pure unsupervised that one breathes and endlessly nodes and afraid nothing. 192 00:24:07,480 --> 00:24:14,440 The pure unsupervised perfectly describes the character of hawk roosting, on the one hand, 193 00:24:14,440 --> 00:24:22,420 it is a lyric autobiographical and even as Simon Armitage points out, a meta poem about the art of writing. 194 00:24:22,420 --> 00:24:29,680 On the other hand, it is so much more than it is an opening of the very bond of the mind pouring in of darkness, 195 00:24:29,680 --> 00:24:36,360 a transformation of the eye pupil so that it can unsupervised inspect your space. 196 00:24:36,360 --> 00:24:40,630 If you miss the scale of that, then poetry shrinks by a third. 197 00:24:40,630 --> 00:24:51,210 Poetry is, after all, a threefold practise, including the lyric, the dramatic and epic. 198 00:24:51,210 --> 00:24:58,410 It has reached the moment when I need to explain what I mean, because I don't mean a large and heroic senator. 199 00:24:58,410 --> 00:25:03,230 That was Aristotle's definition made more than 2000 years ago. 200 00:25:03,230 --> 00:25:08,490 Although it worked time, I think it concealed some of the livelier meanings of the word. 201 00:25:08,490 --> 00:25:14,950 And in so doing, it makes epic unavailable or even invisible to contemporary writers. 202 00:25:14,950 --> 00:25:22,590 My aim in these sorts of lectures is to refresh the world and find it still working and later so-called lyric poetry. 203 00:25:22,590 --> 00:25:29,430 Sometimes Epic is no more than a wolf of darkness, a shiver of not knowing that passes under the surface of a poem. 204 00:25:29,430 --> 00:25:40,200 But if you miss its movement, then you're left with only a small personal feel that poetry poetry of what has been rather than what might be. 205 00:25:40,200 --> 00:25:46,350 So in my first lecture, I asked you to attend to something moving to Robert Herrick first, not the words themselves, 206 00:25:46,350 --> 00:25:53,610 but the alterations happening behind them, epic as duration, epic as erosion in my second lecture. 207 00:25:53,610 --> 00:26:02,870 I defined similarly as resemblance that a large difference. And I defined Epic, an art of similarly an art of multiple sympathies. 208 00:26:02,870 --> 00:26:08,900 Neither of those has anything to do with Aristotle's demand that epic should contain noble characters, 209 00:26:08,900 --> 00:26:13,580 appropriate diction, logical plot and impersonal tone. 210 00:26:13,580 --> 00:26:23,930 But Aristotle was simply itemising what he admired about Homer Aristotle, the great classifier read Homer as a grand and principled poet. 211 00:26:23,930 --> 00:26:34,860 I read Homer differently. Why shouldn't Epic mean an art of light that is, after all, to what Homer meant when he used the word air, 212 00:26:34,860 --> 00:26:39,970 which is normally translated as words, but I believe it means lines or phrases. 213 00:26:39,970 --> 00:26:46,960 Whenever I open some new version of the Odyssey, read that a character spoke and said in words, 214 00:26:46,960 --> 00:26:52,240 I see a flutter of letters floating out of the mouth kind of drawn up tight script, 215 00:26:52,240 --> 00:26:59,460 and it reminds me that the boundaries between words are hard to distinguish unless they are written down. 216 00:26:59,460 --> 00:27:04,290 In spoken language, for hundreds of years, the Homeric poems were only ever spoken. 217 00:27:04,290 --> 00:27:11,100 It is whole phrases. We hear each phrase in a silhouette, of course. 218 00:27:11,100 --> 00:27:24,300 So she spoke and uttered the phrase it, if I read that I see a surge of living sound, an arrow or insect with its line of flight unfolding. 219 00:27:24,300 --> 00:27:26,880 A word is always followed by another word. 220 00:27:26,880 --> 00:27:33,870 The phrase is always followed by a cold, and it means that the pause the language has to fly out and come back again. 221 00:27:33,870 --> 00:27:43,580 That, to me, is what epic means. It is an art of phrases, winged phrases whose flight is about as long as a line. 222 00:27:43,580 --> 00:27:50,030 Mailman Perry, in his research into oral composition, was the first to notice its tendency to think in lines. 223 00:27:50,030 --> 00:27:58,110 He said that the easiest formula for the oral poet to master is that which is both a whole sentence and a whole verse. 224 00:27:58,110 --> 00:28:05,700 His claim has been modified by observations about we're going to a lunch, but these are not chronic run homer shunts, 225 00:28:05,700 --> 00:28:12,090 his phrase is forward one after another after another, like any practised percussionist. 226 00:28:12,090 --> 00:28:20,970 You can sometimes split the rhythm, but the fact remains that he thinks like growth in intonation units and between each unit, 227 00:28:20,970 --> 00:28:25,860 there is a negative space in which the poem breathes. The focus shifts. 228 00:28:25,860 --> 00:28:36,170 The bones fly open. I don't know how to communicate the thrill of reading that kind of poem being carried over the musical. 229 00:28:36,170 --> 00:28:41,900 Always looking ahead into the not yet spoken line like one of real animals with all its perishing 230 00:28:41,900 --> 00:28:49,010 behind it and bolt in front is like being offered the black privilege being the world, 231 00:28:49,010 --> 00:28:56,790 not in words, but in wait or lines and allowing each line its surrounding silence. 232 00:28:56,790 --> 00:29:04,290 That is what I mean by ethics, and under my definition, Erudite Lost is a lyric poem because of its cordless continuity. 233 00:29:04,290 --> 00:29:10,090 It ushers you into a closed space. It moves behind its sound barrier. 234 00:29:10,090 --> 00:29:16,900 Chrome, on the other hand, at every breath turn propels you beyond the voice, beyond the mind. 235 00:29:16,900 --> 00:29:30,640 Out in the pure, unsupervised stage. He sang The Swan Blank Forever. 236 00:29:30,640 --> 00:29:37,590 How the wolf threw away its Tell-Tale Heart and the stars dropped their pretence. 237 00:29:37,590 --> 00:29:43,320 The air gave up appearances. Water went deliberately numb. 238 00:29:43,320 --> 00:29:50,840 The Rock surrendered its last hope. And old died your knowledge. 239 00:29:50,840 --> 00:30:02,730 He sang how everything had nothing to do. Then sat still with fear, seeing the claw track of still hearing the wind beat of rock. 240 00:30:02,730 --> 00:30:20,850 And his own singing. Hughes never read Homer in the original, but his devotion to oral poetry deepened. 241 00:30:20,850 --> 00:30:27,150 I had studied anthropology, gave him a taste for the old way of singing or the blackbirds or the crows. 242 00:30:27,150 --> 00:30:36,750 Call it what you will. The one who sings and then sit still with fear hearing the wind metre Brock and his own singing. 243 00:30:36,750 --> 00:30:41,580 Although the crow cycle contains hints of a mythical connected system, 244 00:30:41,580 --> 00:30:47,460 mistreated female, an exhausted creator and an irrational protagonist and a trickster. 245 00:30:47,460 --> 00:30:53,400 There is an equally powerful system of disconnection at work in the melody. 246 00:30:53,400 --> 00:31:01,070 Every line in the reader is dropped in the pure cold in which the presence of crow can be felt clueless. 247 00:31:01,070 --> 00:31:06,470 The actual like the embodiment of the full stop. 248 00:31:06,470 --> 00:31:17,330 Luck was there without any luck. The within tongue black is the Earth globe, one under an egg of blackness where Sun and moon alternate. 249 00:31:17,330 --> 00:31:45,750 That was to hatch pro a black rainbow bent in its emptiness but flying. 250 00:31:45,750 --> 00:31:47,940 I was in Bristol crossing a road the other day, 251 00:31:47,940 --> 00:31:54,360 and I bumped into someone who was setting off for the Caucasus to look for nomadic musicians in the middle of a pandemic. 252 00:31:54,360 --> 00:32:00,240 He had decided to take a flight across ambulance towards wilderness as he headed off. 253 00:32:00,240 --> 00:32:07,290 He gave a theatrical world, shedding a shrug and said Nobody knows anything anymore. 254 00:32:07,290 --> 00:32:18,320 Nobody has any clue what's going on. It's true we have come to a line end and we are now inside the pause. 255 00:32:18,320 --> 00:32:25,070 They used to be rules for such times. You can find them in phrases, Oldenburg during an eclipse. 256 00:32:25,070 --> 00:32:33,320 You must stop what you're doing and pots and pans. If you are pregnant or frail, you should stay inside. 257 00:32:33,320 --> 00:32:38,110 If it's a lunar eclipse, you should bury lighted brand in the Earth. 258 00:32:38,110 --> 00:32:39,160 In a solar eclipse, 259 00:32:39,160 --> 00:32:49,220 you must tuck up your robes as it's travelling and then leaning on long stage as if heavy laden keep walking in a circle until it is over. 260 00:32:49,220 --> 00:32:57,990 You should shoot fire two arrows into the air. There will be deep, basic and you have crossed the horizon of your knowledge, 261 00:32:57,990 --> 00:33:02,710 the void moved to meet you, the eternal, but it's knowing the sun or Moon. 262 00:33:02,710 --> 00:33:10,910 Keep walking. If only someone might offer that kind of advice at the moment in this unsettling court. 263 00:33:10,910 --> 00:33:20,610 Well, I need from poetry is neither the Mint nor opinion, but a crow like courage to be baffled by evidence and yet keep walking. 264 00:33:20,610 --> 00:33:34,660 He comes forward a step and a step. And a step. 265 00:33:34,660 --> 00:33:39,100 During the bleak years after his wife's first suicide. 266 00:33:39,100 --> 00:33:46,180 After his first wife, suicide, Hughes began to notice that the poetry coming out of Eastern Europe had more of that kind of courage, 267 00:33:46,180 --> 00:33:52,750 a truer sense of absurdity and about a willingness to face it than anything being written in English. 268 00:33:52,750 --> 00:33:59,530 With his friend Daniel White Sport, he established a magazine of poetry in translation and in connexion with that project, 269 00:33:59,530 --> 00:34:05,700 he'd set all up making translations of the Hungarian poet Yano Linsky. 270 00:34:05,700 --> 00:34:11,070 Translation has always been a way of restarting poetry, Lhasa, Wyatt Dryden, 271 00:34:11,070 --> 00:34:18,030 Milton Hopkins and each of them changed the sound of English verse by means of translation. 272 00:34:18,030 --> 00:34:22,660 Those poets were primarily interested in discovering new birth forms. 273 00:34:22,660 --> 00:34:28,350 Hughes did something different in his Berlinski poems, inspired by the span of two of the originals, 274 00:34:28,350 --> 00:34:32,490 with Kandinsky himself characterised as a sort of lack of language. 275 00:34:32,490 --> 00:34:39,060 He seems to have wanted to make translations of the translation itself for grounding its literal nuts. 276 00:34:39,060 --> 00:34:43,570 It's simple. Line by line accuracy. 277 00:34:43,570 --> 00:34:51,100 Hughes spoke no Hungarian and relied on cribs by yellow stockings, some of which he barely taped before publication. 278 00:34:51,100 --> 00:34:56,950 If you can't like the literal crib of a landscape home, he said, it seems to me he's one correct you'd better leave. 279 00:34:56,950 --> 00:35:05,110 Unlike inevitably that left from this urgent, defiant, unpolished began to affect the writing. 280 00:35:05,110 --> 00:35:12,490 You might describe that book as a line by line frame of a line by line print. 281 00:35:12,490 --> 00:35:14,770 But further in and deeper down, 282 00:35:14,770 --> 00:35:22,300 there was an even stranger translation project Hughes had been working with Peter Brook on a version of Seneca Oedipus. 283 00:35:22,300 --> 00:35:27,040 Learning to make an abbreviated, action-packed language that would work on stage. 284 00:35:27,040 --> 00:35:34,000 He finished the play in October 1968. By November, Peter Brook was asking for a translation of King Lear. 285 00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:41,080 He needed the language to be strict, which its for a film script. Most writers would refuse such a blasphemous idea. 286 00:35:41,080 --> 00:35:48,920 Hughes set work. He struggled for a couple of months getting rid of what he called the carry away the language, 287 00:35:48,920 --> 00:35:52,580 and he had a dream in which Shakespeare turned up at his house. 288 00:35:52,580 --> 00:35:57,680 There was a tremendous banging on the back door and when he opened it, there was Shakespeare himself. 289 00:35:57,680 --> 00:36:03,590 Jules roughs and the rest of it boiling with rage about his tinkering with Hamlet. 290 00:36:03,590 --> 00:36:11,420 Shakespeare led Hughes upstairs and then an enormous space in the house, but on his own performance, as it should be put on. 291 00:36:11,420 --> 00:36:17,790 According to him, it was immense, filling the whole sky. 292 00:36:17,790 --> 00:36:25,290 So Hughes apparently abandoned that translation. And Peter Brookes used his own edited script of Shakespeare. 293 00:36:25,290 --> 00:36:30,300 The film came out in 1971 with first published in 1970. 294 00:36:30,300 --> 00:36:35,970 These works are masterpieces in black and white studies of darkness and survival. 295 00:36:35,970 --> 00:36:38,990 Who knows which way the influences round? 296 00:36:38,990 --> 00:36:45,470 The opening scenes of Brooksville film the freezer feted and then live with his back to the camera in a tattered post, 297 00:36:45,470 --> 00:36:51,710 what looked like feathers Earth feel like constellations of hawk roosting and hues had a clear sense, 298 00:36:51,710 --> 00:36:59,600 even when we're making the connexion between the hawk, the poorest of Horus and King Lear. 299 00:36:59,600 --> 00:37:06,730 But the instructions Brooke sent Hughes for making the translation urge sound like instructions for writing crew. 300 00:37:06,730 --> 00:37:10,690 The problem of filming Shakespeare, he said it's how you can change gears, 301 00:37:10,690 --> 00:37:17,170 styles and conclusions as lightly and deftly as the mental protests inside a person. 302 00:37:17,170 --> 00:37:24,880 He asked cues to translate as if it had been written in a foreign language to render it not into a 1969 idiom, 303 00:37:24,880 --> 00:37:30,550 but into a language that to the contemporary needs a poetic expression. 304 00:37:30,550 --> 00:37:36,310 Needless to say, Hughes was absolutely clear and said it over and over again that Lear was the high priest 305 00:37:36,310 --> 00:37:41,980 of a crow god and here and there in the life and songs of crow flashes that are translated, 306 00:37:41,980 --> 00:37:46,360 abbreviated universal King Lear crib and be heard. 307 00:37:46,360 --> 00:37:53,260 We got bored. Who got nothing. Who begat never, never, never never. 308 00:37:53,260 --> 00:38:04,010 Who begat Chrome. Perhaps not unlike the opener performance, which Shakespeare staged in his green. 309 00:38:04,010 --> 00:38:12,830 It used to be said that poetry is what gets lost in translation. It isn't possible to say that anymore in large measure because of Quran. 310 00:38:12,830 --> 00:38:20,450 If it's true that the Quran military was partly inspired by East European poetry and partly by the line units of its translations, 311 00:38:20,450 --> 00:38:27,050 then Crow was not lost but found in translation and partly because of the values of translation. 312 00:38:27,050 --> 00:38:35,920 Such values as simple, helpless accuracy come enshrined as the foremost value of contemporary culture. 313 00:38:35,920 --> 00:38:42,580 All those needs, which Hughes articulated in his introduction to modern poetry in translation, the need to communicate, 314 00:38:42,580 --> 00:38:50,860 to exchange dreams and resolutions and brainwaves to find a shared humanity on the part of untruth in various 315 00:38:50,860 --> 00:38:57,940 contemporary anthologies have translated verse of which my favourite is the Echo anthology of international poetry, 316 00:38:57,940 --> 00:39:03,820 John Ashbery said. It becomes immediately indispensable and I agree. 317 00:39:03,820 --> 00:39:09,910 Kaminski, one of the editors himself, a first rate poet in two languages with occasional glosses in sign language, 318 00:39:09,910 --> 00:39:16,570 speaks in terms similar to feuds of the correspondences that allow poets to be in dialogue across the world. 319 00:39:16,570 --> 00:39:25,140 The universal poetic language has become an actuality, and right now, what could be more needed? 320 00:39:25,140 --> 00:39:33,720 I read this book over and over, and I find in it many pro- like qualities accuracy, urgency, emergency violence, humour. 321 00:39:33,720 --> 00:39:40,140 This is poetry with no megaphone. But I think it is also fair to say that it is poetry with no silence. 322 00:39:40,140 --> 00:39:43,530 If by silence, you mean not just a line break, 323 00:39:43,530 --> 00:39:55,080 but a line break meticulously approached by a phrase whose final note is silent when the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald. 324 00:39:55,080 --> 00:40:02,260 When the curly trawled and sea dusk through a time of wineglasses. 325 00:40:02,260 --> 00:40:05,920 There are plenty of other kinds of silence and sexual silence, 326 00:40:05,920 --> 00:40:11,260 which is part of what a poem means and a convenient silence which divides one from another. 327 00:40:11,260 --> 00:40:16,930 But it is a fundamental fact. Translation there is no melodic silence corresponding. 328 00:40:16,930 --> 00:40:22,900 The original sentence form the one forced upon the poet by nature itself. 329 00:40:22,900 --> 00:40:35,430 Perhaps it is not poetry which gets lost in translation, but silence and in place of silence becomes a taste for knowingness. 330 00:40:35,430 --> 00:40:42,750 Fiona Samson, a brilliant translator of young Kaplinsky, has remarked that poems translate well and they make interesting connexions. 331 00:40:42,750 --> 00:40:49,160 That movement of thought and successions of ideas are what come across in translation. 332 00:40:49,160 --> 00:40:59,160 He's right, of course, if a poem is undisturbed, if its ideas are deft and self-sufficient, it will communicate well in another language. 333 00:40:59,160 --> 00:41:08,610 But what about poems which make interesting disconnections? What about thought ruptured by astonishment, knowledge limited by mystery? 334 00:41:08,610 --> 00:41:13,260 What about discontinuities rather than successions? And what about epic? 335 00:41:13,260 --> 00:41:18,810 If Epic means not a narrative poem in senator, but a broken melody, 336 00:41:18,810 --> 00:41:35,060 a kind of King Lear looped and ragged melody through it, something beyond the human finds expression. 337 00:41:35,060 --> 00:41:48,440 You should now have a recording of her water Panopto taken from the night you were recording done in 1971, I think. 338 00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:53,960 Water wanted to live, it went to the Sun. 339 00:41:53,960 --> 00:42:01,010 It came weeping back, water wanted to live. 340 00:42:01,010 --> 00:42:06,710 It went to the trees. They burned. It came weeping back. 341 00:42:06,710 --> 00:42:14,270 They rotted. It came weeping back. Water wanted to live. 342 00:42:14,270 --> 00:42:20,750 It went to the flowers. The crumpled, it came weeping back. 343 00:42:20,750 --> 00:42:25,940 It wanted to live. It went to the womb. It meant blood. 344 00:42:25,940 --> 00:42:31,700 It came weeping back. It went to the womb. It made nice. 345 00:42:31,700 --> 00:42:38,690 It came weeping back. It went to the womb. It met my gut and roughness. 346 00:42:38,690 --> 00:42:44,720 It came weeping back. It wanted to die. It went to time. 347 00:42:44,720 --> 00:42:49,160 It went through a stone door. It came weeping back. 348 00:42:49,160 --> 00:42:55,190 It went searching through all space for nothingness. It came weeping back. 349 00:42:55,190 --> 00:42:59,450 It wanted to die till it had no weeping. 350 00:42:59,450 --> 00:43:04,700 Left it lay at the bottom of all things. 351 00:43:04,700 --> 00:43:09,530 Utterly worn out. Utterly clear. 352 00:43:09,530 --> 00:43:27,910 Thank you. The melody of Crow, the melody, which, as you said, control the selection of the words, is a looped and ragged one. 353 00:43:27,910 --> 00:43:34,370 The very title of the book From the Life and Songs of The Crow and not just it claims is fragmentary. 354 00:43:34,370 --> 00:43:44,060 These poems are excerpts from some still unfinished life and choose himself referred to them as fragments and not the most important part. 355 00:43:44,060 --> 00:43:51,500 And readings, Jews used to offer improvised episodes and allowed the story to frame the grandparents board had a nightmare which 356 00:43:51,500 --> 00:43:58,550 became Crow Crow interfered with the creation of the world probe and the changes he heard the songs of other creatures. 357 00:43:58,550 --> 00:44:04,820 These prose narratives always slightly different from one performance to the next lead crow towards transformation, 358 00:44:04,820 --> 00:44:11,010 and the poem we just heard marks the moment when he will become more human than bird. 359 00:44:11,010 --> 00:44:15,600 Here he is carrying a woman across a river. She gets heavier and heavier. 360 00:44:15,600 --> 00:44:20,790 Seven times the water rises to the crow's nest and he becomes unable to move. 361 00:44:20,790 --> 00:44:28,160 Seven times he's asked unanswerable question about the nature of love who came off worse, the man or the female. 362 00:44:28,160 --> 00:44:32,740 Or was it animal or bird who took most pleasure? 363 00:44:32,740 --> 00:44:41,410 By means of these delicious riddles, the poem tries to turn tries to lift from its bleakness from inches across the water, 364 00:44:41,410 --> 00:44:50,540 offering poems as half answers, and it's then given a set of magical songs to help him emerge from the unknown world. 365 00:44:50,540 --> 00:44:52,460 The fuse had been Dante, 366 00:44:52,460 --> 00:45:01,190 considering the nature of love by means of perfect rhyming pentameter and the crow poems might have kept descending through purgatory into paradise. 367 00:45:01,190 --> 00:45:03,990 That was indeed Hughes's wish. 368 00:45:03,990 --> 00:45:13,930 But something about humility, perhaps the malady grew out of his state of mind in the 1960s blocked him from making this larger, redemptive poem. 369 00:45:13,930 --> 00:45:19,540 He went on working at Crow throughout his life, filling his notebooks with complicated stories, 370 00:45:19,540 --> 00:45:24,190 strange scrap of alchemy and dreams that never made it into the public book. 371 00:45:24,190 --> 00:45:30,800 But the full monty and Epic proved impossible for him in that form at that time. 372 00:45:30,800 --> 00:45:39,920 One reason might be that his poetic creed called into opposing directions élaborer towards an epic voice, a voice that was more than his own. 373 00:45:39,920 --> 00:45:47,240 But at the same time, he wrote in letters and essays against what he calls the eternal uselessness of most verse now. 374 00:45:47,240 --> 00:45:56,600 And but it is speech, the whole mind moving together. And I look at things in a completely moralising and stylised way, I think straight to the thing. 375 00:45:56,600 --> 00:46:07,360 Those are lyric creeds. The truth is that poetry is the language between us, poetry needs to be neither one thing or another. 376 00:46:07,360 --> 00:46:15,880 Lyric must have a big stick into it, and Epic must have patches of tragedy and tragedy needs to break into lyrics and lyric, 377 00:46:15,880 --> 00:46:23,390 sometimes full face forward into comedy. I began this lecture with a burst of blackbirds, 378 00:46:23,390 --> 00:46:28,650 so I have wandered amongst crows and other birds trying to hear what happens 379 00:46:28,650 --> 00:46:34,710 when poets think with phrases and it rather than with words and more words. 380 00:46:34,710 --> 00:46:42,240 My idea has been that feats opening in its language through which the speaker can hear the next line flying in from elsewhere. 381 00:46:42,240 --> 00:46:47,060 Whereas Lyric speaks over its openings and only hears itself. 382 00:46:47,060 --> 00:46:53,930 It seems appropriate to end argument the pause and then say something altogether different. 383 00:46:53,930 --> 00:47:00,590 So I am going to leave you with a Nightingale, and let's lyrical and lamenting a birds whom comment towards the end of the Odyssey 384 00:47:00,590 --> 00:47:06,930 suddenly imitate it is Penelope in another epic about the nature of love speaking to it. 385 00:47:06,930 --> 00:47:15,680 It's just not knowing who he is. Gregory Naj, in his analysis of the passage, makes much of the work for Potter, which means turning. 386 00:47:15,680 --> 00:47:21,020 He claims this is the technical work, the way poets turn the material they composed. 387 00:47:21,020 --> 00:47:28,870 Joining the lyric repertoire that I kind of inspired staging or Rhapsody. 388 00:47:28,870 --> 00:47:35,410 So here is Penelope's Rhapsody, which I will introduce with Richard Nightingale recorded by my brother in the spring, 389 00:47:35,410 --> 00:47:39,760 while he was locked down in the mountains outside Madrid over three nights, 390 00:47:39,760 --> 00:47:49,750 I received this quiet Nightingale over up and the last one had a note underneath it and you hear darkness and all the racket stream is making. 391 00:47:49,750 --> 00:48:40,840 Well, the answer, of course, is yes, and I can hear the same darkness under Penelope's lines. 392 00:48:40,840 --> 00:48:51,310 Listen, stranger, let me ask you one question. Soon it will be that long four hour when sleep claims each human in spite of his suffering. 393 00:48:51,310 --> 00:48:57,700 But for me, my fate is permanent the all day getting into my anguish and weeping. 394 00:48:57,700 --> 00:49:04,540 I attend to my tasks servants in this house. But when night comes and deep sleep blames them all. 395 00:49:04,540 --> 00:49:11,290 As soon as I lay down, my heart can feel a thousand sharp objects and I start breathing again. 396 00:49:11,290 --> 00:49:20,980 The daughter of Undress Her Green singer as soon as spring comes, she sings in precisions sitting there in the leafy thickness of the trees, 397 00:49:20,980 --> 00:49:28,180 turning this way and that pours out her very voice, lamenting her son, her darling H.A., 398 00:49:28,180 --> 00:49:33,370 with a knife in sheer madness murdered him, the true son of her husband. 399 00:49:33,370 --> 00:49:41,380 I, too, my heart has two strains and in this way and that. 400 00:49:41,380 --> 00:49:54,130 Thank you. And I'm going to welcome Ross back. 401 00:49:54,130 --> 00:49:59,560 Hello. Thank you. Thanks so much, Alice. 402 00:49:59,560 --> 00:50:04,540 It was fantastic and absolutely gripping lecture. Thank you. 403 00:50:04,540 --> 00:50:11,800 As always, the kind of the impulse is to want, as I could hear you saying, there's a kind of impulse to want to pause. 404 00:50:11,800 --> 00:50:19,540 And that would be entirely appropriate because obviously, the lecture structure sort of requires a kind of return, 405 00:50:19,540 --> 00:50:25,150 which sometimes is uncomfortable when people are still trying to reflect. 406 00:50:25,150 --> 00:50:30,370 We have some enthusiastic responses I should pass on to straightaway. 407 00:50:30,370 --> 00:50:39,700 One viewer said Thank you for another fantastic lecture. Another one says, You dramatically transformed my perception of lyric, lyric and epic poetry. 408 00:50:39,700 --> 00:50:50,260 I'm really delighted how I hope she flows from you, ceaselessly connecting generations of poetry from homer to today's poetry. 409 00:50:50,260 --> 00:51:00,220 I wondered if I could just start. I'm stuck on an early phrase of yours when you talked about phrases outlined by pauses. 410 00:51:00,220 --> 00:51:05,450 And I wondered if, but because I think I'm still sort of thinking through your ideas. 411 00:51:05,450 --> 00:51:13,150 I wanted to be. If you if you could, you could email about that word outlined because it seemed to me there's something about in your letter about 412 00:51:13,150 --> 00:51:19,930 attention between the oral and written between the black and white on the page in that black and white line and the 413 00:51:19,930 --> 00:51:29,980 sequential sound of of poetry melody is that since my sweet harmony melodies is simply a sequence of single notes which 414 00:51:29,980 --> 00:51:38,590 form apparently a satisfying experience which might not be the way that we think about the Crow or the Blackbird. 415 00:51:38,590 --> 00:51:46,510 So that would outline, I suppose, what I'm asking is, is this partly about an attempt to go beyond the line? 416 00:51:46,510 --> 00:51:52,780 Or do you still want to make a case for the line as a kind of if you like a sort of harnessing? 417 00:51:52,780 --> 00:52:00,700 And I think that it's particularly noticeable in so-called free verse, which is not a great tool, 418 00:52:00,700 --> 00:52:13,250 but with a poet particularly like cuz the constraint he imposes is is where the phrase and so he makes it very simple. 419 00:52:13,250 --> 00:52:22,180 It can the crow poems that he penned to end his phrases at the line. I think it's quite possible to bring out that. 420 00:52:22,180 --> 00:52:24,440 Or is it the end of a phrase in a different way? 421 00:52:24,440 --> 00:52:35,330 But there is an incredible difference between what form of us is doing, where it's kind of syncopated the phrasing and the metre. 422 00:52:35,330 --> 00:52:41,540 I I think that what I'm trying to draw attention to is that when free verse continues to sink, 423 00:52:41,540 --> 00:52:45,050 but there isn't the metre, you just get a weakened song. 424 00:52:45,050 --> 00:52:53,000 And what I love about shoes is that he just goes full throttle into the tune of the phrase and mocks that by the line. 425 00:52:53,000 --> 00:53:00,320 Does that answer your question? Yes. You're also pointing out my shifting from sound to site, which I you're correct to point out. 426 00:53:00,320 --> 00:53:05,540 I see a shape of a phrase kind of outlined as if it were a picture. 427 00:53:05,540 --> 00:53:12,210 But what I really mean is, is, is a phrase with a pause on either side of it. 428 00:53:12,210 --> 00:53:18,330 Does that answer it? It does, yes, yes, it's very it's very helpful. 429 00:53:18,330 --> 00:53:26,130 So what about perhaps an easier and easy question to help us ease into more of a discussion? 430 00:53:26,130 --> 00:53:32,580 And one that's just come in is could you comment on how your poem slowed down Blackbird came to be? 431 00:53:32,580 --> 00:53:39,450 So I think technically, but that was another transcription of Blackbird Song Slow Down, 432 00:53:39,450 --> 00:53:45,810 which I heard when I was in Devon, which some composer called Hugh Nankivell liked me. 433 00:53:45,810 --> 00:53:52,530 I think a lot of composers are interested in trying to articulate birdsong in a slower form, 434 00:53:52,530 --> 00:53:57,990 because when you slow birds down, you just hear these incredibly beautiful tunes. 435 00:53:57,990 --> 00:54:01,360 So that was a poem that was a response to that. 436 00:54:01,360 --> 00:54:09,200 And it was also just a thought about the sort of desolate time in winter when the Blackbird can't quite manage that amazing spring. 437 00:54:09,200 --> 00:54:17,460 So it was a combination of those two things. Okay. And this question, I'm going to just read it and see if we can pass it ourselves. 438 00:54:17,460 --> 00:54:22,020 It's coming out if Melody is the only law of crow. 439 00:54:22,020 --> 00:54:25,140 How can the Crow reflect thoughts of the poet? 440 00:54:25,140 --> 00:54:34,910 In contrast to the organised poetic syntax of Milton, which theoretically conveys thoughts of the poet in a clearer way? 441 00:54:34,910 --> 00:54:39,530 I might have to have that again. Melody is the only law of crow. 442 00:54:39,530 --> 00:54:41,870 How can the Crow reflect thoughts of the poet? 443 00:54:41,870 --> 00:54:51,390 In contrast to the organised poetic syntax of Milton, which theoretically conveys thoughts of the poet in a clearer way? 444 00:54:51,390 --> 00:55:06,720 And I think part that feels like that's a question about about what I think is the first form use uses allows him to open himself to thought, 445 00:55:06,720 --> 00:55:15,870 but not his own. Whereas Milton, by using such a kind of constructed platform, is transmitting his own thought. 446 00:55:15,870 --> 00:55:20,100 Although I hesitate, I'm sure there are a lot of Milton experts will tell me that's wrong. 447 00:55:20,100 --> 00:55:31,770 But I think that that's kind of an idea that openness that hoped you'd use and that he kind of tracked change in his own poetry from closed to open. 448 00:55:31,770 --> 00:55:40,000 To me, that is about accessing. Thought or revelation or whatever it is that lies beyond your own mind, 449 00:55:40,000 --> 00:55:48,150 and I think that's that's what I sort of find so thrilling about Hughes and keep someone asks, 450 00:55:48,150 --> 00:55:52,020 how should we read the pauses and silences that you talk about? 451 00:55:52,020 --> 00:55:58,070 How do we make the meaning out of the gaps between fragments? And should we try at all? 452 00:55:58,070 --> 00:56:03,230 And. I think it's quite nice to do a little bump with your foot. 453 00:56:03,230 --> 00:56:10,040 And if you physicalize it in that way, then you stop kind of being anxious about being clever about polls. 454 00:56:10,040 --> 00:56:15,350 And I think it's, you know, I think Crow really is a kind of the darkness. 455 00:56:15,350 --> 00:56:22,580 It's like a sort of blackout if you and I allow your mind just to turn around and go into nothingness. 456 00:56:22,580 --> 00:56:31,040 I think quite interesting as well is a little quote from Peter Brook writing to Hughes about how he wanted the language to be. 457 00:56:31,040 --> 00:56:37,390 And I know that. But actors get out of Shakespeare, this kind of. 458 00:56:37,390 --> 00:56:45,160 This thing that between the causes, you can kind of turn your whole mind around, you know, the language, you can come to a completely new decision. 459 00:56:45,160 --> 00:56:53,920 So I think he talked about the deft. I can't remember the words now, but how agile it shifts of a person's mind moving on. 460 00:56:53,920 --> 00:56:58,810 And I think something of that practise includes uses language that that ability to be saying one 461 00:56:58,810 --> 00:57:04,690 thing and then turn and say something completely different so that the language is always growing. 462 00:57:04,690 --> 00:57:08,980 Yeah. This last question, I think, is something that lots of people will have been thinking about, 463 00:57:08,980 --> 00:57:14,500 and certainly I was thinking about as you were talking, which is whether you have you just mentioned the darkness of the crow. 464 00:57:14,500 --> 00:57:17,500 Do you have anything to add about the darkness of the crow? 465 00:57:17,500 --> 00:57:26,650 If we think about melody as its underlying logic, what then do we make of how upsetting or disturbing it can be? 466 00:57:26,650 --> 00:57:31,930 How upsetting the Crow Country? Well, I mean, huge was kind of pretty devastated that he took crow, 467 00:57:31,930 --> 00:57:40,300 as he said it's the lowest point and couldn't, couldn't kind of rescue him various reasons. 468 00:57:40,300 --> 00:57:46,060 He stopped writing the poem he did actually carry on in in the British Library is full of. 469 00:57:46,060 --> 00:57:52,820 It's his notes for how he wants to carry on the poem. I wonder whether. 470 00:57:52,820 --> 00:57:58,010 You know, because melodies do kind of dictate what you can do with a poem, 471 00:57:58,010 --> 00:58:01,700 a block you if it's not the right melody, you can't move in a certain direction. 472 00:58:01,700 --> 00:58:09,230 And the amazing kind of simple clarity that those grow poems achieved maybe couldn't 473 00:58:09,230 --> 00:58:16,760 do the next thing a sort of rather wrought kind of resurrection that he hoped for. 474 00:58:16,760 --> 00:58:18,740 But I don't know that that's a mystery. 475 00:58:18,740 --> 00:58:24,350 I think that we have to leave until, I mean, it's one of the I think it's one of the most helpful things about your definition of epic. 476 00:58:24,350 --> 00:58:31,100 And its openness is that sort of sense that we know that the history of Perch is littered with poets who did not complete their epics. 477 00:58:31,100 --> 00:58:39,110 But that unfinished ness and openness is is how you're defining the epic rather than the kind of thing that you think. 478 00:58:39,110 --> 00:58:41,030 And I think it happens on two levels. 479 00:58:41,030 --> 00:58:47,780 It's both open and unfinished because in each performance, Hughes would give a bit more of the story and change the story. 480 00:58:47,780 --> 00:58:51,680 So to that extent, it is a performance piece, 481 00:58:51,680 --> 00:58:59,240 but it's also open and unfinished in a literary way and couldn't create a kind of redemptive part of the poem. 482 00:58:59,240 --> 00:59:06,830 Although I actually think those the little cluster of poems at the end that were part of the magical songs that I was given. 483 00:59:06,830 --> 00:59:18,650 You know, you don't really need any more than the just so simple and so light and healing that I think you didn't really need to go any further. 484 00:59:18,650 --> 00:59:22,700 How am I doing and haven't got very much full time? I just want to ask this question. 485 00:59:22,700 --> 00:59:27,710 You gave us very helpful summary about two-thirds of the way through of your other lectures 486 00:59:27,710 --> 00:59:32,360 and the the art of the rose and the poems reflection how they connect to the epic, 487 00:59:32,360 --> 00:59:40,120 this question says, Is there any connexion between the poems written in the art of erosion and the poems of reflection? 488 00:59:40,120 --> 00:59:43,360 So think about your other lectures. 489 00:59:43,360 --> 00:59:51,370 Well, I suppose the connexion is only the connexion it makes in my own head that those are poems that I I'm endlessly, 490 00:59:51,370 --> 00:59:58,360 I think, looking for that, that quality, that whiff of darkness or her of not knowing. 491 00:59:58,360 --> 01:00:02,630 And I kind of track it in poems that might not seem to be that. 492 01:00:02,630 --> 01:00:08,380 So I'm sort of very interested in in finding Epic where you wouldn't normally expect it to be. 493 01:00:08,380 --> 01:00:16,240 So. So the connexion is probably only in my own mind. But, but yes, I think it's that that openness. 494 01:00:16,240 --> 01:00:21,550 I think there is an openness in her and in Donne, 495 01:00:21,550 --> 01:00:30,360 I was more actually contrasting them to the way I know has this kind of multiple these multiple sympathies, 496 01:00:30,360 --> 01:00:38,620 whereas on this kind of by his form, he's kind of constrained into in one person. 497 01:00:38,620 --> 01:00:42,520 And I think this may need to be our last question in terms of time. 498 01:00:42,520 --> 01:00:50,260 And it maybe it's an appropriate place to finish sort of where we started, which is how do you feel about your own work in relation to Hughes? 499 01:00:50,260 --> 01:00:58,180 What are the places where you feel you align and where to your intensity for where do you differ? 500 01:00:58,180 --> 01:01:04,930 I've learnt a lot from the sort of technicalities of Hughes, how he how he makes his tunes, 501 01:01:04,930 --> 01:01:13,220 and I I feel he's just, you know, reverse poet that really has an incredible music. 502 01:01:13,220 --> 01:01:18,400 And so I've been always very excited by that. 503 01:01:18,400 --> 01:01:26,220 And I suppose also the feeling that a modern or contemporary poet could. 504 01:01:26,220 --> 01:01:28,380 Could lay themselves that open, 505 01:01:28,380 --> 01:01:36,900 because I think that it is more fashionable to be kind of safe and rational the way he kind of exposed himself to everything. 506 01:01:36,900 --> 01:01:46,100 It's a good start, I think, and the difference is, so do you not want to open up that space? 507 01:01:46,100 --> 01:01:50,820 Definitely differences, probably for other people to point out to me. 508 01:01:50,820 --> 01:01:58,270 I mean, you know, there is the simple difference of gender, which I think is, you know, it is there. 509 01:01:58,270 --> 01:02:04,320 And I think that I don't really know how women sense things differently from men. 510 01:02:04,320 --> 01:02:08,370 And I wouldn't want to constrain what we can do in any way. 511 01:02:08,370 --> 01:02:13,200 But I sense that there is a difference and I think we perhaps we haven't been at it long enough. 512 01:02:13,200 --> 01:02:19,120 We've got much to discover. Maybe. Thanks. I'm going to ask one last, 513 01:02:19,120 --> 01:02:23,410 because I feel like this scholar should have this answer if you have it and you gave it to a wonderful section 514 01:02:23,410 --> 01:02:28,540 about translation and made a really convincing case about the role of translation in Kentucky poetry. 515 01:02:28,540 --> 01:02:37,690 And there's just one question that this person really needs answered, which is which translation of railcar that is using which translation of Rilke. 516 01:02:37,690 --> 01:02:43,470 Oh golly, I'm going to have to. I'm going to have to email this and haven't written it down. 517 01:02:43,470 --> 01:02:50,170 And I remember from my book upstairs, but it would take me a long time, if not required, where we were. 518 01:02:50,170 --> 01:02:54,270 Sorry about that amended email address to us at torch, and we'll get that answer. 519 01:02:54,270 --> 01:02:59,170 Yeah. Thank you so much, Alice. 520 01:02:59,170 --> 01:03:06,210 That was an absolutely, really just a lecture, as always, was so full of directions. 521 01:03:06,210 --> 01:03:13,860 And one thing I would also mention is that Zoom appears to have had its own investment in introducing pauses into your speech. 522 01:03:13,860 --> 01:03:17,460 So the fact that you delivered it with such YouTube, 523 01:03:17,460 --> 01:03:26,310 with such kind of care and precision meant that we could carry on with your lines even when technology was breaking you up for which. 524 01:03:26,310 --> 01:03:32,460 I'm really grateful. So thank you very much. 525 01:03:32,460 --> 01:03:39,690 I want to thank as well everyone else who's involved tonight in making this possible, including the team at Torch and the English faculty. 526 01:03:39,690 --> 01:03:46,530 Thanks so much to everyone who has watched this at home and sending in your comments and your questions. 527 01:03:46,530 --> 01:03:53,190 The audio of Alice's lectures and the audio of lectures by the past two incumbents of this post. 528 01:03:53,190 --> 01:03:57,720 The professor, poUce, are freely available to the public on the Oxford English faculty website, 529 01:03:57,720 --> 01:04:09,110 and this lecture will join them there soon so you can listen to it again and pass it again through your own thoughts and. 530 01:04:09,110 --> 01:04:14,630 I think there I will sign us off with many thanks, Alice. 531 01:04:14,630 --> 01:05:10,008 And we look forward to hearing from you again soon enough.