“I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search.”

— Ted Hughes

The Paris Review interview
Context: I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search. To me, of course, she was not only herself — she was America and American literature in person. I don’t know what I was to her. Apart from the more monumental classics — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and so on — my background reading was utterly different from hers. But our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a lot of shared or complementary dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive. I don’t know whether our verse exchanged much, if we influenced one another that way — not in the early days. Maybe others see that differently. Our methods were not the same. Hers was to collect a heap of vivid objects and good words and make a pattern; the pattern would be projected from somewhere deep inside, from her very distinctly evolved myth. It appears distinctly evolved to a reader now — despite having been totally unconscious to her then. My method was to find a thread end and draw the rest out of a hidden tangle. Her method was more painterly, mine more narrative, perhaps.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search." by Ted Hughes?

Ted Hughes 55

English poet and children's writer 1930–1998

Related quotes

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 22

“I was writing to my wife when your letter arrived, and now I want to look at her portrait myself, seeing the great beauty it contains. I am such a devoted husband that other beautiful women now do nothing for me.”

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558) Holy Roman Emperor

“I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Room Full Of Mirrors
Song lyrics, Rainbow Bridge (1971)
Context: I used to live in a room full of mirrors,
All I could see was me.
Then I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,
And now the whole world is here for me to see,
Now I'm searching for my love to be.