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Analysis Of Hughes 's Poem ' Light Of This '

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However, the ambiguity of Hughes 's poetry may be derived not so much from a desire to obscure truthful representation, but from the inherently traumatic impact of this act of writing. In light of this, Hughes 's fragmentary syntax and the episodic construction of the Birthday Letters sequence, may well be understood as a literal manifestation of his attempt to pull together a "scattered, dispersed, or lost" series of recollections (Freeman, 30); the trauma of which constantly resists any easy assimilation into language. Usually within the discourse of psychoanalysis, it is simply the process of describing a traumatic experience, representing it within language, which forces it to be externalized, contained and thus assuaged. While Hughes certainly seeks to attain this same catharsis, through a kind of "scriptotherapy" (Henke, xxii) his poetic style simultaneously invokes the raw and uncooled processes of its own production. As John Carey writes in a review for the Sunday Times, "The language is like lava, its molten turmoils hardening into jagged shapes, still hot from the earth 's core." ("Fatal Attraction"). In order to understand Hughes 's magmatic poetry more effectively, it is useful to consider Julia Kristeva 's conception of the "signifying process" (84) as proposed in Revolution in Poetic Language (1979). Kristeva conceives of communicative acts as composed of a balance between "symbolic" and "semiotic" aspects (95, The Kristeva Reader). The "symbolic" may be

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