Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity is a two-year AHRC-funded research project led by Dr Steve Ely. The research is designed to explore and investigate the claim that Hughes’s most characteristic, distinctive, and innovative work—wherein lies the weight of his claim to be regarded as a major poet and an internationally significant artist—is essentially Expressionist, characterised by a rejection of objectivity in representation in favour of a Visionary Subjectivity that draws on inner life and imagination to transform and distort content, deploying abstraction, typologies and symbols to shape presentations in an essentially didactic manner. Hughes’s Expressionist mode manifests throughout his oeuvre and includes many of his most celebrated poems and books, including ‘Wind’, ‘Mayday on Holderness’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘Pike’, Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, Gaudete, Remains of Elmet and Capriccio.
The research will generate the following major outputs:
• A monograph—Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity—to be published in 2025/26 by Shearsman Books.
• A symposium with the same title, organised in partnership with the British Library. The symposium will take place at the British Library on Friday September 15th, 2023.
• A series of creative writing workshops, associated pedagogical materials, open poetry competition and anthology—Apocalyptic Landscape
|
|
|
|---|
Our upcoming symposium:
Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity
British Library, Friday, 15th September 2023
Visionary Subjectivity: Creative Writing
Our in-person and online workshops, downloadable resources and poetry competition
Return to the Ted Hughes Network
Return to our Ted Hughes Network Home page to learn more about our network and research