Ted Hughes: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Ted Hughes
The function of poetry. The function of art.
In the seventies I got to know one or two healers. The one I knew best believed that since everybody has access to the energies of the autoimmune system, some individuals develop a surplus. His own history was one of needing more than most -- forty years of ankylosing spondylitis. In the end, when he was sixty, a medium told him that no one could heal him, but that he could heal himself if he would start to heal others. So he started healing and within six months was virtually cured. Watching and listening to him, the idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this -- the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others, too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it. However it comes out -- whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway -- we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art. It consoles and heals something in us. That's why that aspect of things is so important, an why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art -- because it's a living medicine that we can still use. It still works. We feel it working. Prose, narratives, et cetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely. Music, maybe, most intensely of all.
The Paris Review interview with Ted Hughes, author of poetry collections such as Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow and Birthday (winner of the 1999 British Book of the Year Award), was published in 1995.
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