With Margot Robbie cast as Cathy in the latest iteration of Wuthering Heights, my co-host, Pele Cox, argues that without poetry Emily Brontë’s book wouldn’t have been written in the first place. So no roles for Robbie and her Heathcliff, Jacob Elordi. No Kate Bush song. No poems of the same name by Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes.
The evidence? Well, we learn how Brontë turned to prose only after a collection of poetry she published with her sisters (under the pen names Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell) failed to sell more than a few copies. Pele also posits that a nascent Heathcliff can be found in the works of Romantic poets such as Shelley and Byron – the very material Brontë would have been reading at Haworth parsonage in the years before she penned Wuthering Heights.
POETS
- Emily Brontë (No Coward Soul is Mine)
- Percy Bysshe Shelley (Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici)
- George Gordon, Lord Byron (Manfred Act II – The Summoning of Astarte)
- Sylvia Plath (Wuthering Heights)
- Ted Hughes (The Birthday Letters – Wuthering Heights)
- Kate Bush (Wuthering Heights song with lyrics)
Further reading
Ted Hughes is my go to poet if ever I find my own writing getting too flowery (which is often). His Birthday Letters, though outwardly an elegy to his first wife Sylvia Plath, is a lesson in how everyday language is all the raw material a poet needs. I read just a few lines from his Wuthering Heights on the podcast. Here’s my run at the whole poem. You’ll hear, I hope, that with the simplest of words – a limited palette if you like – Hughes paints the most beautiful picture. There’s the art.
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