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Poet: Ted Hughes
Poem: The Minotaur
Volume: Birthday Letters
Year: Published/Written in 1998
Comment 1 of 1, added on October 23rd, 2008 at 5:33 PM.
This is a particularly vicious example of Hughes' poetic diatribes against his wife Sylvia Plath, evidently after one of their pitching-matches. Toward the end he casts himself as Theseus regretting he married Ariadne, the "goblin" being the god Dionysos who became her next husband, and the "skein" her famous thread that had led him in the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur. The end itself is a mishmash of allusions to her parents Minos and Pasiphae at the "horned" Palace of Knossos in Crete. Oddly the poem has nothing directly to do with the Minotaur, except that it perversely appears to equate the monster with the children (his own too) by linking them with a labyrinth. Thus although it makes some use of the Greek myth's characters to vilify his relatives, it adds nothing to the myth's long tradition in Western literature and art, while subtracting further from Hughes' value as both a bard and a human being.
Jon van Leuven from Sweden
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This is a particularly vicious example of Hughes' poetic diatribes against his wife Sylvia Plath, evidently after one of their pitching-matches. Toward the end he casts himself as Theseus regretting he married Ariadne, the "goblin" being the god Dionysos who became her next husband, and the "skein" her famous thread that had led him in the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur. The end itself is a mishmash of allusions to her parents Minos and Pasiphae at the "horned" Palace of Knossos in Crete. Oddly the poem has nothing directly to do with the Minotaur, except that it perversely appears to equate the monster with the children (his own too) by linking them with a labyrinth. Thus although it makes some use of the Greek myth's characters to vilify his relatives, it adds nothing to the myth's long tradition in Western literature and art, while subtracting further from Hughes' value as both a bard and a human being.
Jon van Leuven from Sweden