The Compound I: The Group Self and the Poetic Self

Abstract

This article starts with a consideration of `The Poetic Self' (1992), an essay written by Ted Hughes as a centenary tribute to TS. Eliot. In this Hughes argues that the voice of poetry from ancient times came from contact with higher, external creative powers, and it was this connection with sacred meaning that gave poetry its power He also proposes the idea that this is something that has changed, that the poetic self underwent a mutation, dated around the early years of this century, and the work of Freud had a significant part in this change; in fact, that human consciousness itself had mutated, and Freud was part instigator; part secretary to the change. From a metaphysical universe centred on God we moved to a new kind of reality, without the consolation and the persecutions of the supernatural world, but with a new terror, that of meaninglessness. (By `we' in this context I take Hughes to mean something like the dominant perception of the age, the sense by which the majority of people within a culture make sense of their experience of living.) It is Hughes's argument that the previously sacralized outer landscape was translated by Freud into an interior landscape in which new ways of discovering meaning could be found, but that this was an incomplete translation which left an emptiness, a void, which has been in itself the distinctive tone and central preoccupation of Modernism, and the centre of the tradition since then. In this article I will attempt to consider these arguments, and take the discussion on from that point into a consideration of what group analysis can offer from this perspective. This will take me to a consideration of what connections there might be between this idea of the poetic self, in its mutated and pre-mutated forms, and the concept of the group self, in order to see if there is an area of connectedness between the two that might be one of mutual enrichening.