Escaping Into Solitude Poem by gershon hepner

Escaping into solitude,
avoiding hunters’ need to roam,
I long for the latitude
to find my longitude, my home,
where the goddess who presides
over hearth and in the kitchen
born one week before the Ides,
lets me worship her and richen.


Michiko Kakutani reviews Diane Middlebrooks’ “Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage” (Viking) in The New York Times, October 14,2003:

The portrait that emerges is that of a selfish artist who 'lived for poetry, with single-mindedness of the sort he had long ago discerned in W. B. Yeats, the first poet who ever seized his imagination.' Together, he wrote in a letter quoted in this book, Plath and he found a way to 'sacrifice everything to writing.' Without each other, he contended, he would probably have wandered off to Australia, and she would have become a professor and written books on the side. He told a friend that the marriage had been 'marvelously creative' for him for half a dozen years.
But he found it surprisingly easy to move on then, leaving Plath and their two children, when he 'wanted to be out from under her watchfulness, ' in Ms. Middlebrook's words. Because the marriage was an emotionally fraught and artistically productive relationship, the narrative of 'Her Husband' cannot help but fascinate, providing new tidbits of information and insight to anyone who has followed the melodrama of the poets' relationship and the scholarly deconstruction of their art and their lives.
The problem is that Ms. Middlebrook insists on subjecting Hughes's life to a relentlessly Freudian and often highly speculative reading, not dissimilar to that in her 1991 biography of Anne Sexton. And in placing Hughes on the couch she demonstrates an unfortunate tendency to overemphasize the autobiographical elements in his poems (at the expense of his imaginative transactions) and to gloss his actions and choices with a thick patina of psychological determinism.
She writes that the Hughes poem 'Song' is 'quite evidently a poem about the impact of Sylvia Plath on Ted Hughes, even if it was inspired by another woman and written more than half a dozen years before Hughes met Plath.' And she predicts that 'Hughes's access to poetic inspiration was eventually going to require two specific forms of rebellion against domesticity.' Both 'would be enacted against the women in his life, selfishly and sometimes cruelly': the first being an 'escape into solitude, ' the second being what she calls 'the hunter's freedom to roam, ' a need nourished, she contends, in his childhood, when he would escape his mother's suffocating hold by going out on the moors to hunt with his older brother, Gerald.
Hughes was a devotee of Robert Graves's book 'The White Goddess, ' which held that poetry evolved from masculine rituals of devotion to the Goddess thereby preserving humanity's connection to nature's cycles of birth and destruction. It is Ms. Middlebrook's theory that he found his muse in Sylvia Plath and that he saw their marriage as 'the doing of the White Goddess, ' which he was powerless to resist.

10/14/03