Is this simultaneously one of the greatest poems Hughes wrote and one of the most puzzling? Unequivocally, yes. Indeed, let's go further and assert those attributes apply to 'Gaudete' not just in the context of the work of Hughes but in that of the whole of post-war poetry in English. This will be a deeply controversial opinion in 2023 I know. Apart from arguing on literary merits there is the subject matter of the poem (if of course one can maintain a questionable abstract distance and separate the two).

It's perhaps unsurprising that Hughes felt obliged to preface 'Gaudete' with an 'Argument':

An Anglican Clergyman, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is carried away into the other world by elemental spirits...
To fill his place in this world, for the time of his absence, the spirits make an exact duplicate of him out of an oak log, and fill it with elemental spirit life...
This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of love in his own log-like way.
He organises the women of his parish into a coven, a love-society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is the birth of a Messiah to be fathered by Lumb.

If that sounds odd and off-putting, I would understand both points of view but I nevertheless agree with John Bayley, writing a few years after its publication, that 'Gaudete' is 'one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry,'

Bayley goes on to say that part of the achievement of the poem is how 'fantasy – the very odd tale or legend that preoccupied the author – is made as real as life on the farm.' How Hughes brilliantly effects this is absolutely the most striking aspect but also from a technical point of view formally 'Gaudete' is remarkable. The nature and structure of the verse is brilliantly developed, its effortless shifting utterly organic, often achieving a completely graceful elision from prose to verse and back. Above all, it is the most dramatic and disturbing recreation of the Dionysos/Bacchae myth I have ever read. One of the epigraphs to the poem is from Heraclitus to the effect that Hades and Dionysos are one - and (paraphrasing) that therefore, one has to expect shocking things to occur. The whole poem feels as if it takes place not quite in its ostensible very English rural village setting but in some liminal space adjacent to it in which very brutal, amoral things are commonplace. (Although the incongruity of 'The Archers' meets Ovid is brilliantly done and not without considerable humour in places). This is profoundly unsettling and the depiction of the violence which is inseparable from Hughes' vision is necessarily difficult to read. But for me it remains a masterpiece for its Ovidian and Shakespearean reimagining. I understand this might be a divisive view - it's a testimony to my reaction to what I have read and not an argument, rhetorical or otherwise to persuade you to take a different view or even necessarily to read it.

It's a shock to pick up the 2003 'Collected Poems' and find that only the 'Epilogue' poems are included. Particularly as the later reprinting of the poem contains a longer, (sort of) clearer version of the 'Argument' for example, which suggests to me that Hughes was trying to engender a greater understanding of the work. To omit one of his most significant and extraordinary achievements from his 'Collected Poems' is a major decision. It's unclear what led Paul Keegan to do this. We know when Hughes was alive he included only some of the 'Epilogue poems' and no extract from the main poem in the 'Selected Poems' Faber put out in 1981. But this decision is explicable surely on the grounds that he didn't feel he wanted to break up what is a notably sustained piece of work. It doesn't follow at all that he somehow wanted this expunged from his canon in the same way Auden did with 'The Orators' for example.

Incidentally the ebook is of the later version of the poem (with the cut down version of the 'Argument' at the start). It fails to format a lot of the verse properly and indefensibly - does nobody at Faber think it worth employing someone with at least intermediate HTML skills?. The 'Epilogue poems' are also rendered, inexplicably, in a much larger font size. Unbelievably sloppy. I purchased this beautiful original edition (paperback but with the Baskin cover) after returning the Kindle one for a refund. ( )

The passion of the writing in this volume has been described as delivering the sensation of a line writing itself in front of the reader's eyes.