(19551956) he echoes Davie, to begin with, noting how the "long death" of the last war, in being "documented," will be sanitized, made verbally "safe.'' In his radical definition, however, the problem goes to the roots of poetry, which "deceives with sweetness harshness," traducing the matter of sordid fact into the consonance of aesthetic form, thus making it not only acceptable but attractive.
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The task is to find a music that replicates the brutality of history without abandoning a sense of the superior order of poetry, a tonic possibility that gives nothing away to the realist. These ambitions generate the distinctive textures of the poems he begins to write in 1955. Witness the studied ineloquence of the abrupt overture to "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings":
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 | | For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.
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A parallel extension of New Critical principles informs the early work of Ted Hughes, who is usually (and wrongly) seen as a poet wild and whirling as the moors of his native Yorkshire. The challenge and value of that critical sensibilityto densify the world's body in the physical body of language and thus subject it to the formal order of artinspires Hughes's imaginative vision as well as his technical practice in
The Hawk in the Rain
(1957). The title poem, for example, uses heavy alliteration to thicken the verbal texture and consolidate the material reality of words, while its fiction shows the poet straining toward the hawk's steady flighta point of supernal perfection, an overmastering formal control:
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| | I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Hell after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk
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| | Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet . . .
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The vantage of the hawk is associated more specifically with the advantage of art in other poems, as in "A Modest Proposal." Here two lovers, likened to two frenzied wolves in the wood, are recomposed and calmed at the sight of the great huntsman, depicted here in the lineaments of
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