Similarities Found Between Amy Lowell's Poetry and Works by Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence

At The Guardian, Alison Flood reports on Dr. Hannah Roche's findings which suggest that D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes owe an "unacknowledged debt" to Amy Lowell. "Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised," Flood begins. "But Hughes’s image of a fish with 'green tigering the gold' has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes 'confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work' in a new paper." From there: 

According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians, which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures, Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems.

“In Lowell’s poem, ‘shadows’, ‘green-and-copper’, ‘under the reeds’, and ‘orange’ appear in sequence; in almost the same pattern, Hughes’s poem gives us ‘green tigering the gold’, ‘silhouette’ , ‘under the heat-struck lily pads’, and an ‘amber cavern’,” she writes, also highlighting the “echo” of Lowell’s line, “darkness and a gleam”, in the final line of Hughes’s poem: “Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed”.

“Readers would be forgiven for mistaking Lowell’s poem for a shorter draft of Pike, or for suggesting that Hughes confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work,” writes Roche.

Read more at The Guardian.