The Invisible College Lesson Three: Getting Better Acquainted with Words
May 21, 2017
Ted Hughes, celebrated poet known for elemental imagery, guides listeners through words that move and breathe. Short lectures and archival readings explore muscular, sensory language and quieter echoes of shape and sound. Voices like Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty and Charles Bukowski appear in excerpts, adding sensual associations, cinematic texture and a comic, irreverent aside.
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Words That Move And Sensory Language
- Words become alive when they evoke senses or movement rather than abstract labels.
- Ted Hughes argues living words make a poem a creature, while dead words maim its spirit.
Sense-Linked Words Pack Punch
- Vivid words often map to senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, or action.
- Such words 'sock us between the eyes, the ears or the teeth' and produce immediate impact.
Welty's Moon Held In The Mouth
- Eudora Welty recalls first sensing the moon as a round globe and tasting the word 'moon' like a concord grape.
- That memory shows how a word can become a sensuous, embodied object in the mind.