American and British Studies Annual (Dec 2013)
Richard Hugo on Skye: Tragicomic Poetry of the Self
Abstract
The article examines a book of poems, The Right Madness on Skye (1980), by American poet Richard Hugo (1923–1982), a major representative of the confessional and landscape mode in postwar Anglophone literature. In this book, inspired by a sabbatical year spent on the Scottish island of Skye, Hugo explores themes of dispossession, home-seeking, and sympathy for the underprivileged, yet there is an element of humor in the Skye poems that his earlier work does not show. The blend of nostalgia, melancholy, and tragicomedy is what makes the topographical poetry of Hugo a memorable exercise in poetic appropriation of a remote region that shares, despite the considerable cultural and geographic differences, a great deal with his native country of the Pacific Northwest and his adopted home in the state of Montana.
