This is a selection of prose pieces by Ted Hughes that he helped put together with his editor William Scammell. There are some short critical reviews, longer introductions to other poets works and his own collections, there is his introduction to Poetry in the making, extracts from his Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and two long unpublished essays on Myths, Metres and Rhythms and a critic of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visionary poetry. There are five pieces on his wife Sylvia Plath including his introductions to her poems and journals and decisions he made on collecting and publishing her work after her death. On whatever subject he is writing the immense character of Hughes comes shining through. Sylvia Plath said of Ted Hughes that “Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever’, and something of that comes across in these essays.

The opening sentence in a short essay published in the London Magazine in 1961 states that:

“The poets only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is, and this in itself seems to be another gift that few poets possess.”

Hughes certainly believed he had that gift and the beauty of many of these essays is the insights that they provide into the mind of the poet. Hughes describes how he makes poetry, what influences his thoughts, and then goes on to explain how his poems should be read. In perhaps the best essay in the book (there are many excellent ones) Myths Metres and Rhythms he tells how he received a letter from a young reader asking him what the hell was going on in his poem “In the Likeness of a Grasshopper” In his reply Hughes explained what he was trying to say and then reflects on how poems can or on this case cannot be interpreted by the reader. Hughes wonders wether the young reader had ever seen a grasshopper if not then he would have been completely at a loss in interpreting the poem. Hughes had been making the point that literary people in the Western world would have a working knowledge of myths, legends and stories from the past and the poet can draw down on these myths to make his points, however there might have already come a time when peoples’ experience of the natural world has become so limited that a nature poet such as himself would struggle with communicating a more realistic subject.

Hughes writes best when he is writing about poetry or other poets and most of these essays do just that. His love and fascination for words, for meanings, for imaginative writing hurtle off the page and may ignite or rekindle his readers’ interest in the subjects. I would describe Hughes as a writer of conviction and while this might be empowering for some readers, others might be put off when he carries this too far. Rather like D H Lawrence he can go off on an imaginative foray which can take him far beyond where his readers may want to be. For example in his introduction to a collection of prints of Leonard Baskin he describes a print of The Hanged Man so rigorously and imaginatively that he is in danger of losing even those readers that are familiar with the prints. Hughes writes that ‘Traces and variations of Shamanism are found all over the world’ and his interest in the subject and the mysterious inner world of the psyche can lead to writing that is difficult to get to grips with. However if we are reading an author because we admire his adventurous imagination we should not worry if we cannot always follow in his footsteps. An essay entitled Shakespeare and Occult Neoplatonism put me on my defence, but it turned out to be clear and incisive and the issues raised will stay with me next time I read Shakespeare.

The two longest essays are the most fruitful. Myths, Metres, Rhythms starting with the sentence ‘Mythologies are dodgy things’ takes as its subject the unorthodox metres of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and stretches back to the Elizabethan poet Thomas Wyatt with stops in between taking in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Hughes uses the rough metaphor of a turbulent woman for unorthodox metres to delightful effect. It is Coleridge that is the subject of The Snake and the Oak, the other long essay and here Hughes goes out on one of his limbs with his idea that Coleridge’s battle between his unleavened self and his Christian self resulted in his three major visionary poems - Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. He provides an interesting reading of the three poems that made me want to re-visit them immediately.

Lovers of poetry will delight in Hughes enthusiasm and who would not want to read essays by one of the greatest post second world war poets and so 4.5 stars. ( )

This collection of occasional pieces is wildly uneven. Most of the book consists of short reviews and rather longer prefaces for editions of a wide variety of literature, mostly poetry. The reviews are thoughtful and written in magnificently crafted prose. The prefaces tend towards the serious and choose one aspect of the work in question to discuss with some thoroughness. Not surprisingly, his comments on Sylvia Plath and here work are most illuminating and satisfying. (It is, perhaps, ironic that the manuscript shown on the cover of this edition is hers.) From my point of view, his openness to occult metaphysics especially shamanism, detracts form the interest of what he has to say. The last third of so of the book is previously unpublished and consists of a long essay on Coleridge's metrics, which to my ear at least, is somewhat arbitrary, and a very long essay indeed on myth and metaphysics in Coleridge's symbolism, which I verging on nonsense. ( )