Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: the poetry of the will

Dwight Eddins

Tennyson's scarifying glimpse of nature in In Memoriam as a scene of primordial violence revisits a weltanschauung as old as philosophy itself - an outlook famously summed up in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes when he asserted that the "natural" condition of humanity is "warre . . . of every man, against every man" and that life in a state of nature is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (88-89). Ironically, Hobbes's own century would see the emergence of natural theology, with its emphasis on nature as an incarnation of the highest ethical ideal, summed up by the third Earl of Shaftesbury as "morality, justice, piety, and natural religion" (Cooper 1: 301-02). It was this view that would dominate English nature poetry well into the Romantic era, when - as the next installment of irony - the Hobbesian strain would resurface with singular vigor and trenchancy in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Tennyson's older contemporary.

The affinity between the poet's fleeting visions of animal savagery and the philosopher's sustained ruminations on it is salient. Tennyson considers the awful possibility that mankind is linked, as an even more degenerate "monster," with "Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime" (56.22-23). And here is Schopenhauer on "the observable life of animals":

we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on in saecula seculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks. (World 2: 254)

Tennyson, of course, would recant in favor of a revised natural theology by poem's end, but the outlook so mercilessly articulated by Schopenhauer would become more compelling as modernist perspectives gradually impinged on the Victorian intellectual milieu. Both Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, the inheritors and elaborators - in their very different ways - of Tennyson's primordial vision, would admit to basic affinities with the German philosopher's thought.(1)

This thought finds its fullest poetic realization, however, in our own time, in the verse of Ted Hughes. His menagerie - the hawk, the jaguar, the shark, and their ilk - fits even better than Lawrence's birds, beasts, and flowers into Schopenhauer's "bellum omnium" of predation. A paradigm case is the cannibalistic pike, driven by appetites and killer instincts so fierce that the poet is able to find two of them, "six pounds each, over two feet long, / High and dry and dead in the willow-herb - / One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet" ("Pike," Lupercal). The human animal figures prominently in this company of killers. In "Mayday on Holderness," for instance, a "pierced helmet" and "Cordite oozings of Gallipoli" explicitly evoke "The expressionless gaze of the leopard / The coils of the sleeping anaconda / The nightlong frenzy of shrews" (Lupercal).

But the affinity between Schopenhauer and Hughes runs much deeper than their mutual obsession with animal savagery. From his first principle of der Wille - the will - which he sees as generating not only the phenomenon of hunter and hunted but all the other phenomena of existence, Schopenhauer articulates a complex ontology and epistemology that parallel in illuminating ways the poet's instinctual assumptions about what nature fundamentally is and how we perceive it.(2) When Michael Bell speaks of the language philosophy of Ernst Cassirer as providing an "explicatory parallel" or an "appropriate conceptual analogy" to the work of Lawrence, he is describing the interpretive dynamic I am assuming here - the outlining of a sort of philosophical force-field that brings out the "internal cogency and complexity" of the given author's conceptions (3-4). The aspects of Hughes's work that I wish to examine in this regard are his fabulation of a fierce feminine presence as the presiding deity of the natural order, his projection of some sort of consciousness onto the vegetable and mineral realms, his esoteric renditions of sheer dynamic process, and his stylistic evolution from explicit interpretive frameworks to implicit ones.

Hughes himself gives warrant for the Schopenhauer connection in a 1970 interview. When Ekbert Faas commented that "Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's thought bears a striking resemblance to yours," Hughes replied:

The only philosophy I ever really read was Schopenhauer's. He impressed me all right. You see very well where Nietzsche got his Dionysus. It was a genuine vision of something on its way back to the surface. The rough beast in Yeats' poem. Each nation sees it through different spectacles. (205)

The affinity with Schopenhauer that Hughes affirms here is a visceral one, the sense of a shared assumption so instinctive and elemental that it almost defies articulation: a subterranean "something" of many names, a demonic ur-force, that periodically erupts to crack the rational, harmonious "surface" of civilizations. But it is precisely because Schopenhauer so closely links the visceral with the basis of his metaphysic that Hughes's recognition here is so valuable in understanding his own poetic enterprise.

This basis is the will - the blind, compulsive, irresistible striving that is, for Schopenhauer, the ground of all being. It is not only devoid of knowledge in itself, but is unknowable in any direct way. We can experience it only through its phenomena, which include ourselves and everything else in the world. In the terms that Schopenhauer appropriates from Kant, it is the noumenon, the Ding an sich that transcends the phenomenal categories of space, time, and causality on which our empirical experience is totally dependent. Despite popular misconceptions, Schopenhauer is not denying the reality of the experienced world, but rather affirming the primacy and opacity of the ground that generates it and thus provides its fundamental nature and its unity.

The unity of the will is reflected in what Schopenhauer calls "the reciprocal adaptation and adjustment of . . . [its] phenomena," a primal "harmony" that makes it possible for "the species in the organic, and the universal natural forces in the inorganic, [to] continue to exist side by side and even mutually to support one another" (World 1:130). But the essence of the will is also manifested in an "inner antagonism" that

shows itself . . . in the never-ending war of extermination of the individuals of these species, and in the constant struggle of the phenomena of these natural forces with one another. . . . The scene of action and the object of this conflict is matter that they strive to wrest from one another, as well as space and time, the union of which through the form of causality is really matter.

Even though each particular conflict has its aim - the wresting of matter - no point of satisfaction and rest is ever reached, nor is there any ultimate point to the process of willing. The will itself, which comprises all that is, has no aim or limits. The ground of existence is ultimately a purposeless but perpetual dynamic - "eternal becoming, endless flux" (World 1: 164).

Since the volition and consciousness associated with the notion of will are absent, it is unfortunate - as Bryan Magee points out - that Schopenhauer chose a term with such strong conative implications (141-45). A much better term, in Magee's estimation, would have been energy, which has the imprimatur of modern physics as the underlying reality of all phenomena from the subatomic to the macrocosmic, from forces such as gravity to the matter on which these forces work. With this interpretation in mind, we can better understand how Schopenhauer is able to classify as manifestations of will not only the organic phenomena of the universe but the inorganic. More precisely, he locates in the "dumb, insensible matter," plant life, animal life, and human life that make up the natural world "the four differentiable grades of the will's objectification" (Magee 147). The order of listing is not only the order of their evolutionary appearance but of ascent in a hierarchy based on ever-increasing individualization and ever-increasing sophistication both of structure and of response to surroundings.

Even so brief a sketch of Schopenhauer's philosophical enterprise demonstrates the purely rational grounding and the scientific respectability that he sought for it. Nonetheless, there remain stubborn traces of what we might call inspiritedness in the notion of a universal force-field that makes even inorganic nature the embodiment of a seething restlessness and of a struggle to prevail, and that has such persistently conative implications in the term - der Wille - that names it. We can add to this the anguished, horrified, far-from-neutral tones in which Schopenhauer again and again describes the will. As Magee points out, this particular philosopher "was possessed by the idea that there is something inherently evil, monstrous, wicked about the ultimate force that constitutes the world" (148). But even if these lingering hints of malevolent volition are contaminants in a purely philosophical sense, they provide a very useful bridge to a poetic enterprise that posits in and behind the whole of nature a devastatingly potent, amoral, and threatening presence.

It is just such a presence that utters itself in Hughes's poem "Hawk Roosting" (Lupercal), as Hughes's own description attests:

Actually, what I had in mind was that in this hawk, Nature is thinking. . . . I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature... and Nature became the devil. He doesn't sound like Isis, mother of the Gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler's familiar spirit. There is a line in the poem almost verbatim from Job. (Faas 199)

Hughes makes it clear that the hawk-persona here is actually the oracle for the genera five process itself, the inexorable creative force that lies behind particular creatures - even "Gods" - and takes on a satanic, Hitlerian aspect for those apostles of mercy and measure who experience its pitiless, boundless functioning. As Keith Sagar points out, with respect to Hughes's biblical allusion, "In Job we find God still acknowledges as his own the most crude and savage powers of nature - behemoth and leviathan" (Art 49). The avatars of blind, overwhelming appearance and depredation are not incidental to the ground of being, but of its essence.

This ground, characterized as it is by a wild, irrational instinctuality, is totally antithetical to the classical notion of the Logos, the cosmic reason that orders the world and renders it intelligible. Both Schopenhauer and Hughes are fascinated by the ironies inherent in an antilogical logos. For the philosopher, consciousness was originally evolved by the will as a survival mechanism for animals that had to seek their food. It is represented by the brain, he says, "just as every other effort of the self-objectifying will is represented by an organ" (World 1: 150). Even at the lower levels, however, consciousness brought with it "the possibility of illusion and deception, whereby the previous infallibility of the will acting without knowledge is abolished. Thus mechanical and other instincts, as manifestations of the will-without-knowledge, have to come to its aid guided in the midst of manifestations from knowledge" (World 1: 151). At the highest, human, level, these problems are strikingly compounded:

with the appearance of reason, this certainty and infallibility of the will's manifestations . . . are almost entirely lost. Instinct withdraws altogether; deliberation, now supposed to take the place of everything, begets . . . irresolution and uncertainty. Error becomes possible, and in many cases obstructs the adequate objectification of the will through actions. (World 1: 151-52)

This antithesis between the awful certitude of will-driven instinct and the fancy-prone irresolution of human reason provides the animating tension of "Hawk Roosting." The "hooked head and hooked feet" of the predator represent, like the human brain, organic "objectifications" of the rapacious will, but they are free from the "falsifying dream" that debilitates the brain and causes it to send delayed or faulty commands to the extremities by which it survives. One aspect of this "dream" is the tendency to construe surroundings aesthetically rather than strategically. Phenomena that we find pleasant or exhilarating - "the high trees. . . . the air's buoyancy and the sun's ray" - are "of advantage" to the hawk in its hunt for prey. Schopenhauer finds enormous value in absorbed aesthetic contemplation precisely because it releases the contemplator, for the moment, from the stringent urgencies of will, enabling him or her to become "the pure subject of will-less knowing" and thus to be taken out of "the stream of time and of all other relations" (World 1: 197). Hughes's poem as aesthetic artifact embodies this phenomenon, but simultaneously subverts it by explicitly reinstating the ascendancy of the anticontemplative, aggressively immediate will. This is a point to which I will return later in considering Hughes's artistic development in a Schopenhauerian light.

Schopenhauer's assertion, cited above, that particular body parts represent particular objectifications of the will in its entirety is reflected in the hawk's boast that "It took the whole of Creation / To produce my foot, my each feather." The idea that the monolithic, monistic ground of being objectifies itself in the overwhelming variety and multiplicity of natural phenomena leads to interesting corollaries for both poet and philosopher. One of these entails an essential and inescapable reciprocity between phenomenon and noumenon. In Schopenhauer's words: "If . . . all variety of forms in nature and all plurality of individuals belong not to the will, but only to its objectivity and to the form thereof, it necessarily follows that the will is indivisible and is wholly present in every phenomenon" (Word 1: 155). The contradiction or "inner antagonism" in the will that so fascinated and appalled Schopenhauer also follows. As Bryan Magee strikingly describes it:

In the animal world the war of all against all is a struggle in which one manifestation of the will survives by devouring, by literally eating, another. It is a hungry will, insatiable and unassuageable, and the will's phenomena have only each other to feed upon, for there is nothing else in the world. In this sense the will devours, and can devour only, itself. (155)

Since "the whole of" creation/nature/will produced the hawk's prey as well as the hawk, the voice that speaks through the latter is precisely the voice of this universal and unrelenting predation. Thus the hawk's claim that it is the devouring master of that which shaped it: "Now I hold Creation in my foot/Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine."

This last line is, presumably, the one Hughes says he took "almost verbatim" from the Book of Job. Sagar identifies this source as Job 41:11, where God asserts that "Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine," and rightly emphasizes the nature of the speaker as a savage god who has not yet become "the God of Love" and "is not interested in justice or morality" (Art 49-50). This sorts exactly with Schopenhauer's undercutting of human reasoning processes as reflections of a logos that delineates the ultimate nature of being. These processes are, rather, the sources of the error, irresolution, and specious rationalization that the hawk contemptuously transcends: "There is no sophistry in my body: / My manners are tearing off heads," and again, "No arguments assert my right." No cosmic teleology, no eschaton, no remediation of any sort can be expected from the blind, inexorable play of creation and destruction that grounds existence, justifying Schopenhauer's gloom and the hawk's concluding claim: "Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. / I am going to keep things like this."

Postulating this identity, however provisional, between Hughes's nature/creation and Schopenhauer's will, leads to a more profound understanding of the rationale behind the poet's animation of vegetable and mineral existence. The monistic, universal, and dynamic nature of the will as Schopenhauer construes it lends itself well to the fiction of a quasiconsciousness, in varying modalities, that informs all the phenomena of creation and makes for a drama of constant interaction between them. This drama is played out in the poems, of course, for the benefit of a human consciousness that is all too real and acute, and that is forced into the ironic perception of just how alien and how cognitively incommensurable is the rest of the creation to which it theoretically belongs.

The title of Hughes's poem "Still Life" (Wodwo) captures vividly the irony of the will's dynamism inspiriting, as it were, even such seemingly static phenomena as an outcropping of stone and a harebell - the former the lowest grade of the will's objectification and the latter the next above it. The "boundary" between these two grades is, says Schopenhauer, "the most sharply drawn in the whole of nature." The "inorganic body" finds its "identity and integrity" in matter, while its form is "inessential and changeable." The situation of the organic body is exactly the reverse:

its existence . . . consists simply in the constant change of the material with persistence of the form. . . . Therefore the inorganic body has its continued existence through repose and isolation from external influences. . . . [whereas] the organic body has its continuous existence precisely through incessant movement and the constant reception of external influences. (World 2: 296)

Tenaciously protecting the matter that provides its essence, Hughes's stone is a "miserly" hoarder of its constituent "nothings," smug in the belief that it can take without giving in the relentless economies of wind, sun, rain, and snow. It seeks repose and isolation by pretending to be "dead of lack," and thus to escape the exactions of Schopenhauer's "external influences." The self-deluding nature of this stratagem is revealed by the trembling, inconspicuous harebell, which - unlike the stone - vividly registers the "threats of death" inherent in nature's terrible energies. The flower depends on the "incessant movement" of these energies, but embodies and figures them at their most cataclysmic. The will in its role as "maker of the sea," as earth shaper, "sleeps" in the plant preparing the upheavals of the aeons that will see the rock relentlessly diminished and reconfigured, then submerged by the sea that uncovered it in the first place.

The notion of geological predation is more immediately dramatized in another poem from Wodwo, "Sugar Loaf," where the antagonists are both inorganic matter and are already locked in a struggle for survival, even though the hill - like the rock of "Still Life" - "suspects nothing." The "trickle" of water "cutting from the hill crown" is literally cutting away that crown by dissolution - a fitting process, since the water itself is dangerously dissolute, "wild as alcohol," whorling "to a pure pool . . . with a whisp trout like a spirit." This metaphor of inspiriting the inanimate reflects Schopenhauer's insistence that "we are compelled to recognize volition in every nature or tendency of a material body" ("Will" 309). The Hughesian irony is to locate in water a mode of volition analogous to that of the hawk. But here, too, Schopenhauer provides the metaphysical rationale:

Every grade of the will's objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another. Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, each striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another. (World 1: 146-47)

This observation provides a convincing background for the poet's stark prophesy, "I see the whole huge hill in the small pool's stomach," and his dark understatement, worthy of Beowulf, "This will be serious for the hill."

Volition as it appears in the phenomena of the will - hawk, rock, flower, hill, and water - has a purposiveness predicated not only on survival but on total dominance, since each apparent portion of will is a projection of the will as the sum of reality. But the will in itself, the will as noumenon, has no such focus and direction: "Absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature of the will in itself, which is an endless striving" (World 1: 164). As Hughes moves into the bleak sophistications of Wodwo and the volumes beyond, he begins to come to terms with the closely related conception of a seething, blind, indefinable energy that underlies and fuels the processes of nature in their entirety. This effort to dramatize the almost ineffable leads to an indirectness and abstruseness that yield - at least partially - to what we might call a noumenal reading of the poems involved.

"Pibroch," from Wodwo, is perhaps the most striking and ambitious of these works. Its title denotes a set of variations for bagpipes on a traditional dirge or martial theme. Music thus becomes an analogue of sorts for the functioning of the mysterious but fundamental dynamic that preoccupies Hughes in this poem. It is a mirroring that Schopenhauer has theorized in some depth:

music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more exactly, of the will's adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. (World 1: 262-63)

Elaborating the analogy, he recognizes "in the deepest tones of harmony, in the ground-bass, the lowest grades of the will's objectification, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet," and in the higher tones above this ground "the plant and animal worlds" (World 1: 258).

In "Pibroch," it is the steady drone of the bagpipes beneath the melody that stands in for the "mass" of "inorganic nature" so central to the poem's bleak drama. Strictly speaking, this drone is an organ point that is sustained even when the melody crosses it to produce dissonance, rather than a ground-bass varied to produce constant harmony; but this very difference serves to illustrate Schopenhauer's principle of inner antagonism, of the will turning on itself. On the phenomenal level, the notion of melodic variations acts to differentiate the sea, rock, wind, and tree of the poem as distinct antagonists and as varying modalities of quasiconsciousness. On the noumenal level, however, the whole idea of variation in a monistic force-field is ironically undermined.

The cosmic monotony quite literally inherent in the monotone, the organ point of the inorganic, is captured by the poem's opening:

The sea cries with its meaningless voice Treating alike its dead and its living, Probably bored with the appearance of heaven After so many millions of nights without sleep, Without purpose, without self-deception.

The principal thrust of this description, however, is not to differentiate the sea from "higher" phenomena, but to reintegrate it, symbolically, with the noumenal will of which it is a representation. The sea's very lack of distinctiveness and discrete components makes its use as a symbol of the monolithic will convincing. As Schopenhauer observes, individuality - at its peak in human beings - declines through the realms of animals and plants until "finally, in the inorganic kingdom of nature all individuality completely disappears" (World 1: 132). Void of rationality and meaning, aimless, mindlessly incessant, the sea as will stands in contradistinction to the "appearance of heaven," which is to say, to the mere appearance of a logos that betokens a moral code and a coherent teleology. Instead, the ground of being proves to be such that sleep, purpose, and self-deception are of a piece in a purposeless universe.

Turning his attention to a rock in the sea, Hughes uses the phrase "Stone likewise" to confer upon it the same symbolic status, with the dubious distinction that, as phenomenon, the rock is "imprisoned / Like nothing in the Universe." The rock's occasional "dream" that it is "the foetus of God" is yet another ironic subversion of the divine logos, a process continued by the wind that rushes over it as a parody of the divine afflatus. This spiritus associated with the "blind" stone and "able to mingle with nothing" negates any hope of communion with the First Cause and of cosmic orientation amid the mere "fantasy of directions" that its arbitrary shiftings represent. Once again we are faced with an analogue of the invisible, boundless, aimless will.

The tree that is "Drinking the sea and eating the rock" is differentiated from both by that organic/inorganic boundary that Schopenhauer considered - as we have seen - the "most sharply drawn in the whole of nature." But, in keeping with the poem's atavistic thrust, the phenomenal blurs back into the noumenal in the image of the self-contradictory will feeding on itself as it generates a desperate and totally pointless "struggle" to survive in a barren, hostile environment. Similarly, the quasiconsciousness of the tree as a higher-order phenomenon is brutally diminished in its description as "An old woman, fallen from space," who "hangs on, because her mind's gone completely." It is not too much to say, in fact, that the cosmic status of human intellect itself is compromised by Hughes's metaphor, as it is by Schopenhauer's description of it vis-a-vis the will:

the intellect is of a secondary character, and merely the organic function of a single part, a product of life; not the innermost kernel of our being, not the thing in itself, not metaphysical, incorporeal, eternal, like the will: the will never tires, never grows old, never learns, never improves by practice, is in infancy what it is in old age, eternally one and the same. . . . Being essential, moreover, it is likewise immutable, and therefore exists in animals as it does in us. ("Will" 247)

This passage reads like a philosophical gloss on the last stanza of "Pibroch":

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon, Nothing lets up or develops. And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout. This is where the staring angels go through. This is where all the stars bow down.

The fundamental dynamic of nature, as presented here, is both normative and inexorable. It is also blindly unstinting, banally repetitive, and totally without telos. The angels, ostensibly the agents of God's will, can find no point of purchase in the nihilistic abyss of Schopenhauer's; and the stars, which Hughes follows William Blake in associating with rationalistic orderings, are forced to pay homage to an absolute irrationality at the very core of things.

Hughes forces us, as observers of this pointless, incessant process, to share in the angelic vertigo, and also - as he raises his focus to the sentient grades of matter - in the pathos of what Schopenhauer calls "the suffering animal world" (World 1: 379). At this level, consciousness itself becomes the prey of the perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction that mark its ground:

The striving of matter can always be impeded only, never fulfilled or satisfied. But this is precisely the case with the striving of all the will's phenomena. Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum. . . . Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will. (World 1: 164)

Schopenhauer refers specifically to the "life of birds," with its "endless needs and exertions" in the service of a "future that afterwards becomes bankrupt" (World 2: 353).

In his poem "Poor Birds" (Moortown), Hughes once again produces what we might call a poetic correlative of the philosopher's speculations:

In the boggy copse. Blue Dusk presses into their skulls Electrodes of stars. All night Clinging to sodden twigs, with twiggy claws, They dream the featherless, ravenous Machinery of heaven. At dawn, fevered, They flee to the field. All day They try to get some proper sleep without Losing sight of the grass. Panics Fling them from hill to hill. They search everywhere For the safety that sleeps Everywhere in the closed faces Of stones.

The stars here are no longer avatars of a callow rationalism, but the poles of the will as galvanizing current, as the blind, seething, ubiquitous energy that burns without stint in the galaxies and relentlessly drives the creatures beneath them. The "machinery of heaven" is the will, unfeathered and unfleshed in its noumenal status. As the literally insatiable hunger at the heart of being, it is also the stuff that dreams are made on, and thus the subverter of all repose. Waking is nothing but a feverish flight from dream-hungers into the terrors of real ones - the unending needs to eat and to avoid being eaten. The linkage between an all-pervasive anxiety and the all-pervasive will is inherent in the etymology of the "panics" that constantly flush the birds from place to place. The word derives literally from the Greek god Pan, whose "presence or unseen appearance caused terror" in the woodlands, and whose name derives in turn from the Greek [Greek Text Omitted], meaning "all" (Oxford 646). This latter etymology was subsequently adopted by philosophers "who saw in the God the Universe, the Totality" (Grimal 341). Their search for safety "everywhere" is doomed to failure because the will that drives them is everywhere, decreeing that they - as organic phenomena - must stay in motion in order to constantly renew that matter the "sleeping" stone enjoys as a nonrenewable essence.

Even though the birds must "suffer" the will's relentless pressure in proportion to the grade of consciousness they possess, they obviously are incapable of formulating a notion such as "poor birds." This act is the prerogative of the human intellect, which is able to separate itself from the immediate demands of the will long enough to contemplate disinterestedly the essences of phenomena. In Schopenhauer's terms, we are able to relinquish considering things under the guidance of "the principle of sufficient reason," which involves considering them solely with regard to "the where, the when, the why, and the whither" as these relate to "our own will." Instead, we turn to the what, in which "the particular thing, at one stroke, becomes the Idea of its species, and the perceiving individual becomes the pure subject of knowing" (World 1: 178-79). This "Idea" is, for Schopenhauer, "the most adequate objectivity possible of the will" (World 1: 175). It occupies an intermediate status between the will, of which it is a direct objectification, and the particularized phenomena that are the will's indirect objectification.

Along these lines, Hughes's oblique, enigmatic poem "Wodwo," from the volume of that title, can be profitably read as a drama of consciousness in which the evolving psyche struggles with the advent of a "pure" subjectivity that conjures "Ideas" along with the unsettling quest for whatness that they involve. The Middle English term wodwo is taken from a catalogue of fierce wilderness creatures in Gawain and the Green Knight and is variously translated as satyr, troll, and wild man of the woods, according to Keith Sagar, who goes on to cite Hughes's own gloss: "Introducing a reading of the poem Hughes described his wodwo as 'some sort of satyr or half-man or half-animal, half all kinds of elemental things, just a little larval being without shape or qualities who suddenly finds himself alive in this world at any time'" (Art 98). Elsewhere, Hughes says that he imagines this "half-man, half-animal spirit of the forests" as something that "does not know what it is and is full of questions. It is quite bewildered to know what is going on" (Poetry 62).

Leonard Scigaj, in a particularly useful observation, places the poem itself in a group that presents

nature as benevolent, transfigured by a newly won sense of freedom wherein the psyche of the persona is not subject to an emotional dependency or ego dependency upon either the environment or cultural givens, but is rather a bemused spectator who can view nature as a soothing companion because of an already achieved calmness of mind. (110)

Though one might question whether the wodwo finds nature "soothing," this commentary is quite in the spirit of the Schopenhauerian dynamic by which consciousness temporarily triumphs over the unremitting pressure of the will and conceptualizes the will's phenomena - including itself - in a spirit of objective curiosity. As a "half-man" just emerging from the tyranny of the animal's pure survival-focus, the wodwo is driven into a peculiarly intellectual ferment by having "been given the freedom of this place." Its question "What am I?" leads it to examine its position vis-a-vis the rest of nature not in self-defense, but as a matter of classifying itself and of orienting itself within a sort of conceptual geography:

I enter water. What am I to split The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed Of the river above me upside down very clear What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find his frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret interior and make it my own?

The last question has a three-fold resonance. It not only foregrounds for contemplation what Schopenhauer calls "the Idea" of another "species"; it suggests the mental assimilation of one phenomenon by another involved in the contemplation process, and it calls up as a second-order abstraction the Idea of the process itself - the wonderment that one is involved in such an enterprise. This layered self-consciousness, with its awareness of awareness, is more evidence for Keith Sagar's assertion that Hughes himself "is a wodwo in all his poems, asking these same questions of the world in which he finds himself" and thereby "expressing the idea of the poet" (Art 98). Schopenhauer underwrites such an identification in singling out the artist as the ultimate purveyor of the "knowledge of the Ideas," as the practitioner of a process that "plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world's course and holds it isolated before it" (World 1: 185).

Elaborating on this artist-Idea nexus, the philosopher describes a particular mode of aesthetic response to nature that bears even more specifically on the case of Hughes:

But these very objects, whose significant forms invite us to a pure contemplation of them, may have a hostile relation to the human will in general, as manifested in its objectivity, the human body. They may be opposed to it; they may threaten it by their might that eliminates all resistance, or their immeasurable greatness may reduce it to nought. Nevertheless, the beholder may not direct his attention to this relation to his will which is so pressing and hostile, but although he perceives and acknowledges it, he may consciously turn away from it, forcibly tear himself from his will and its relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, may quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will. . . . he is then filled with the feeling of the sublime. (World 1: 201)

Since the wodwo/poet is "half-animal" and "half-man," he is at once a creature in the grip of blind, will-driven instincts unmitigated by reason and a detached psyche capable of contemplating from the inside the will's inexorable urgencies. The essential power of Hughes's poetry derives, it seems to me, from its struggle to render comprehensible the ineffable immediacies of will from which its images and formulations are - in Schopenhauer's figure - "forcibly" torn. The awe and terror evoked by the Hughesian sublime are produced not so much by the hawk, the jaguar, the predatory landscape on which a particular poem centers, as by the sense of close encounter with the primal energy - rapacious, unstinting, and totally indifferent to human concerns - that fuels existence.

It is in the stark, unsettling nature poems of Wodwo that Hughes finally perfects this mode, so that the evocations of the will as primal energy seem somehow informed by that energy, and always on the verge of dissolving back into its inscrutable vortex. His development to this point might itself be construed in Schopenhauerian terms as one of more and more immediate representations of the will, starting from his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), where the power that energizes nature seems more argumentatively and abstractly conceived, emerging indirectly from the strenuous and somewhat rigid dialectics of particular poems. In the title poem of that volume, for instance, the hawk is depicted - in counterpoint to its slogging, bemired observer - as "The diamond point of will that polestars / The sea drowner's endurance." By the time of "Still Life," "Sugar Loaf," and "Pibroch," however, a new immediacy is evident in representations that appear to partake of the generative (and destructive) flux they embody.

This mode persists in Hughes's work, it should be pointed out, long past the 1967 publication of Wodwo. In Wolfwatching (1989), for instance, we find the sparrow hawk with eyes "still wired to the nuclear core" ("A Sparrow Hawk") and the fierce macaw in the fiercer grip of "the dancing stars / Who devised this / Trembling degradation and prison" ("Macaw"). It is true that in this interval another aspect of Hughes has emerged, the seeker of larger harmonies and reconciliations in the teachings of Eastern religions. But here too we find the

shadow of Schopenhauer, who sought along some of the same paths for means of negating the will's relentless pressures. In the last analysis, it is hard to locate a point in Hughes's development where his profound affinity with Schopenhauer is not evident, and where it does not illuminate a poetry that explores more intrepidly than any other the nightmare of ravening cosmic energies - what Hughes in the poem "Pike" calls "the dream / Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed, / That rose slowly towards me, watching."

NOTES

1 On Hardy's and Lawrence's links with Schopenhauer, see, respectively, Seymour-Smith (329-31) and Montgomery (43-72).

2 Keith Sagar mentions Schopenhauer as one of those we may wish to study in the quest to "seek out new coordinates" for reading Hughes ("Introduction" xiv-xv).

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-----. "Introduction." The Challenge of Ted Hughes. Ed. Keith Sagar. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. "The Will in Nature." Two Essays by Arthur Schopenhauer. Trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand. London: Bell, 1889.

-----. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969.

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