In my literary youth I listened to a recording of Hughes reading his poems, including this one:
What will you make of half a man
Half a face
A ripped edgeHis one-eyed waking
Is the shorn sleep of aftermath
His vigour
The bone-deformity of consequences
His talents
The deprivations of escape
How will you correct
The veteran of negatives
And the survivor of cease?
Back in my teens I would go along with anything, but even so that one didn't work for me. (Better than this though.) Also, "shorn sleep" was so close to "shorn sheep" that it ruined the effect, and I was sure that's where Hughes got it.
Sean O'Brien wrote an essay about Hughes going off the rails for a while with respect to diction. I've read Orghast at Persepolis which was about some pretty strange stuff.
― alimosina, Thursday, 21 January 2016 20:18 (seven years ago) link