Poetry in the making

http://thetedhughessociety.org/poetryinthemaking/

“Poetry in the Making is not a fusty pedagogical treatise on prosody but an attempt to inspire and guide the young “to more purposeful efforts in their own writing” [2].  Hughes insists that a course of creative writing should not teach “How to write” but “How to try to say what you really mean” [3].  His emphasis in Poetry in the Making is not on learning the formal “manners” of poetry but on developing the writer’s imagination and his discipline and courage to engage with and capture his own thoughts and feelings.  For Hughes, the most important artists are the inspired visionaries not the craftsmen.

Hughes draws on his own writing experiences throughout Poetry in the Making, describing, for example, the evolution of ‘Thought Fox’, and so the book offers an overview of the author’s poetics, his preoccupations, and his ideas about the creative imagination and the function of art.  He believed that all true art was the unmediated expression of the artist’s hidden, inner self which is “the voice of what is neglected or forbidden” [4].  He warned that “to live removed from this inner universe of experience is also to live removed from ourself, banished from ourself and our real life”[5]  So, for Hughes, the purpose of art is revelatory and therapeutic; in allowing the inner-life to speak, in articulating its demands, the writer heals himself. “