The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

This is the second of two podcasts recorded with Dr. Mike Sweeting on the topic of Ted Hughes's relationship with religion - specifically Christianity. Mike concludes his observations with his thoughts on how some of Ted Hughes's later work - particularly some of the poems included in Birthday Letters, the last collection published in his lifetime - indicate a change of attitude on Hughes's part: a willingness to acknowledge the suffering he has caused others as well as the suffering he has experienced; an aparent willingness to make amends; and a tendency towards elegy and lamentation.Works mentioned in the podcast:'Crow blacker than ever' from Crow: from the life and songs of the Crow (2020) with an introduction by Marina Warner. London: Faber & Faber.'The Shot' from Birthday Letters (1998) London: Faber & Faber.'October Salmon' from River (1983) with photographs by Peter Keen. London: Faber & Faber.'The Strand at Lough Beg' from 100 Poems (2018) London: Faber & Faber.For listeners who would like to read further about Ted Hughes and religion, Dr Ann Skea writes:'Among the loose pages in the British Library file Add Ms 88918/9/9, there are several which record Hughes' pondering on his difficulties in keeping his "large multiple front operations fully operational"; and his need to make "more serious moves" if he is "truly intended to make a close communion with the divinity". He examines what he means by 'the will'; paraphrases Kirekegard's comments about the difference between "worshippers who merely imagine their relationship with the divinity and those who undergo it as a transforming experience"; and writes revealingly of his own relationship with religion and religions.I would also reccomend Dr Krishnendu Gupta's article in vol. 8 issue 1 of The Ted Hughes Society Journal (http://thetedhughessociety.org/the-ted-hughes-society-journal-open-access) and David Troups's book length study Ted Hughes and Christianity (2019) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The opening and closing music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 131, oerfomed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

This is the first of two podcasts arising from conversations recorded with Dr Mike Sweeting on the topic of Ted Hughes’s relationship with religion. Mike's observations included Hughes’s fascination with various pagan and occult beliefs - ranging from his engagement with the Goddess, his fascination with shamanism, and his lifelong practice of astrology - and his antipathy, stated on several occasions, to Christianity, despite having memorably declared that his favourite book was the Holy Bible. Mike is a committed Christian, and a former pastor, he is also a noted scholar of Ted Hughes, having completed a doctoral thesis at Durham University entitled ‘Patterns of Initiation in the Poetry of Ted Hughes 1970-1980’. One of the main themes of Mike’s thesis is the pervasive influence of shamanism in Hughes’s work from early animal poems such as The Jaguar  through to Gaudete. Mike is chair of the International Map Collectors’ Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and a council member of The Ted Hughes Society. He is an expert on mergers and acquisitions in business, and has chaired charities working in deprived parts of NE England, India and Romania. Books mentioned during the podcast inlude:Hughes, Ted (1977) Gaudete. London: Faber & Faber.__________ (1979) Moortown Diary. London: Faber & Faber.__________ (1979) Remains of Elmet (with photrographs by Fay Godwin). London: Faber & Faber.__________ (1992) Shakespeare and The Gooddess of Complete Being. London: Faber & Faber.Lewis, C.S. (2017, originally 1956) Till We Have Faces: a myth retold. London: Harper One.__________in Fox, Denton ed.(1968) Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. London: Prentice Hall.The opening and closing music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 131, oerfomed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

The third Ted Hughes Society Podcast centred around Mark Wormald's The Catch. In this episode, West Country storyteller and writer Martin Shaw retells the legend of The Salmon of Knowledge; scholar and poet Katherine Robinson tells to story of the ancestry, conception and birth of the great Welsh bard Taliesin; storyteller and author Liz Weir tells her version of The White Trout a tragic tale of murder, lost love and transformations from County Mayo; and scholars and poets Mark Wormald and Terry Gifford tell of their shared experience of seeing a pod of salmon from the Toombeola Bridge in County Galway. 'Floral Tribute' by Simon Armitage can be read at https://www.faber.co.uk/journal/floral-tribute-by-simon-armitage/. 'The Salmon of Knowledge' is taken from Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems (2020) by Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland, published by Graywolf Press. Mabinogion Legends: Kilwch and Owen, Peredur, Lludd and Llevelys, Taliesin (1992) Translated by Charlotte Guest is published by Llanerch Publishers. 'The White Trout' is from the CD Liz Weir: The Glen of Stories, available from liz@lizweir.net. The Catch (2022) by Mark Wormald is published by Bloomsbury. Terry Gifford's poem 'A Shoaling at Toombeoloa Bridge' is in the collection A Feast of Fools (2018) available from t.gifford@bathspa.ac.uk.The extract from Camille Saint-Saens's Carnival of The Animals is performed by Neal O'Doan and Nacy O'Doan (pianos) and The Seatle Youthg Orchestra conducted by Vilem Sokol. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0.)

In this, the second Ted Hughes Society Podcast, Mark Wormald and the poet, priest, musician, and scholar Malcolm Guite look in detail at Ted Hughes's poem, 'The Kingfisher', which can be found on page 70 of River (Faber & Faber, 1983), on page 166 of Three Books Faber & Faber (Faber & Faber 1993), and on page 662 of the hardback edition of Ted Hughes Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan (Faber & Faber 2003).Malcolm Guite is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest and academic. He was until his recent retirement Chaplain at Girton College, where he continues to be a life fellow. Malcolm holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Durham and his research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of Coleridge, Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and Owen Bardfield. Malcolm is the author of five books of poetry, including Sounding The Seasons: Seventy sonnets for the Christian year (Canterbury Press, 2012) and David's Crown: Sounding the Psalms (Canterbury Press, 2021). His critical books include Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Routledge 2012) and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018).The opening music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 13 by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP:Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0.)The extract from Camille Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals is performed by Neal O’Doan and Nancy O’Doan (pianos) and The Seattle Youth Orchestra conducted by Vilem Sokol. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0.)

The first Ted Hughes Society podcast, in which we’ll be looking at Hughes’s love of the watery environments of river, pool, lake and seashore with the help of Mark Wormald, chair of the Ted Hughes Society, poet, critic, fellow at Hughes’s old college, Pembroke College, Cambridge - and a fisherman, who has recently published The Catch, subtitled ‘fishing for Ted Hughes’, a full-length appreciation of Hughes’s lifelong commitment to fishing, as expressed in his fishing diaries and many letters to his friends. Mark’s book also recounts his own early introduction to fishing, his growing absorption in its challenges, frustrations and delights, and how with the help of Ted Hughes’s magnificent collection of poems River, and guided by those fishing diaries, he went fishing in Ted Hughes’s still discernible footprints.The Catch is published by Bloomsbury (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/catch-9781526644244/), and the extract Mark reads in this podcast is from the chapter 'Stealing Trout.' Mark's reading is introduced by Katherine Robinson, a research student at Pembroke College, Cambridge who is working on the presence of the Mabinogion and other Welsh in the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The opening music is from String Quartet No 14, opus 13 by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (This extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP:Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0.) The closing music is from Piaon Quartet in A major, D667 'The Trout' by Franz Schubert, performed by George Solchany (piano), Arpad Gerecz (violn), Vilmos Palotal (cello), Thomas Lorand (viola), Jacques Cazauran (double bass). (This recording is in the public domain.)