Pagan epic in contemporary British poetry: Hughes and Logue, Ovid and Homer

In 'Tales from Ovid' and 'War Music' respectively, Ted Hughes and Christopher Logue turned to classical epic as source material and a model for contemporary poetry. In this essay I consider the different ways in which they work with the original epic poems and how they rework them both textually and generically. In the process, I suggest, Hughes gives his readers an Ovid modeled on his own, vatic conception of Homer, while Logue reworks Homer in a manner that is essentially Ovidian.

Aidos

Aidos, an abstraction whose meaning ranges from shame to modesty, is personified in literature (Hani 1980) but not art (Cairns 1996). Homer contrasts aidos, personal shame, with Nemesis, public indignation (Scott 1980).

Graces

The Graces, known by their Greek name Charites (sing. Charis) are young and benevolent models of feminine grace. Homer does not specify their number and ages, but Hesiod explains that they are three daughters of Zeus and Eurynome (a daughter of Okeanos), named Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thaleia (Theog. 907–9); they live with Himeros (Desire) on Olympos, beside the Muses (Theog. 64); and they assisted with the birth of Pandora (Op. 73).

Personifications

Artists as early as Homer created personifications – representations of nouns in human form – to explain aspects of the primary characters, particularly Olympian divinities: the Litai (Prayers) as daughters of Zeus, for example, express an aspect of Zeus' broad-ranging powers.

Backtracks: a devised performance

Backtracks aimed to investigate critical relationships between audio-visual technologies and live performance, emphasising technologies producing sound, contrasted with non-amplified bodily sound. Drawing on methodologies for studying avant garde theatre, live performance and the performing body, it was informed by work in critical and cultural theory by, for example, Steven Connor and Jonathan Rée, on the body's experience and interpretation of sound. The performance explored how shifting national boundaries, mobile workforces, complex family relationships, cultural pluralities and possibilities for bodily transformation have compelled a re-evaluation of what it means to feel 'at home' in modernity. Using montages of live and mediated images, disrupted narratives and sound, it evoked destablised identities which characterise contemporary lived experience, and enacted the displacement of certainties provided by family and nation, community and locality, body and selfhood. Homer's Odyssey framed the performance: elements could be traced in the mise-en-scène; in the physical presence of Athene, the narrator and Penelope weaving mementoes from the past into her loom; and in voice-overs from Homer's work. The performance drew on personal experiences and improvisations, structured around notions of journey. It presented incomplete narratives, memories, repressed anxieties and dreams through different combinations of sounds, music, mediated images, movement, voice and bodily sound. The theme of travel was intensified by performers carrying suitcases and umbrellas, by soundtracks incorporating travel effects, and by the distorted video images of forms of transport playing across 'screens' which proliferated across the space (sails, umbrellas, the loom, actors' bodies). The performance experimented with giving sound and silence performative dimensions, including presenting sound in visual and imagistic ways, for example by using signs from deaf sign language. Through-composed soundtracks of live and recorded song, music, voice-over, and noise exploited the viscerality of sound and disrupted cognitive interpretation by phenomenological, somatic experience, thereby displacing the impulse for closure/destination/home.