Rejected. Humiliated. Degraded. Again and again when speaking in interviews, autobiographical essays, and poems, Richard Hugo brings these words into the discussion of his life. Besides offering, as Roethke had, a psychological theory for writing from obsession, Hugo also talks freely about the psychological problems in his past, covering the bleak areas of his life with an evenhandedness free from self-pity or posturing, admitting the power of emotional forces that we are sometimes born with and sometimes learn to submit to too easily. His talking about such matters in interviews and essays provides a basis for understanding the importance of those poems scattered throughout his work that refer to loss and degradation. Poems like "Between the Bridges," "Neighbor," "The Way a Ghost Dissolves," "No Bells to Believe," "Duwamish," and others from A Run of Jacks (1961) contain a presence of hurt that cannot be missed. They stand as a tacit admission of the importance, for survival in this world, of integrating and making whole a sense of self.

Hugo's problems are always tied to specific forces—economic, regional, historical, personal—that make the grist for the mill of his poetic obsessions. Hugo is very much the American Depression poet, coming to prominence forty years after that great economic shock haunted his childhood and that of a whole generation of Americans. The Depression shaped his consciousness of need, leaving a background from which he struggled to escape…. Poverty haunts him, with its unglamorous ache; it infests the town he carries with him, wherever he goes, as in this poignant opening to one of the best of his "letter poems," "Letter to Levertov from Butte."… This town may be Butte, Montana, but the town that Hugo carries with him is Seattle, more specifically, Hugo's working-class neighbor-hood just outside Seattle, White Center. He carries that town with him since what he sees, in any town, is an organization of human society that allows the hurts of poverty to ruin people's lives.

Next to White Center, when Hugo was growing up, were two other working-class neighborhoods, Riverside and Youngstown, where Hugo had most of his early friends. There, near the Duwamish River, the boys saw every day "the castle, the hill. West Seattle, where we would go to high school."… [West Seattle represented] the eternal presence of the ideal: the social acceptance and economic confidence that are just out of reach. The ideal could be had with money. Attaining the ideal meant being beautiful and safe, secure in the knowledge of power, and being able to understand and control social and economic realities. Money was the key to power, beauty, and love. Without money, faces were not calm, want was real, and love was something spurred by need.

Beneath the lack of money—the dispossession from society and the things of this world—lay another dispossession: Richard Hugo was born Richard Hogan, the son of a father who deserted his teenaged wife. Hugo's mother; she, in turn, left her infant son to be brought up by her parents. When she later married a man named Hugo, young Richard decided that that would be his surname. Thus a double dispossession lies behind Hugo's early poems. In some ways his first two books, A Run of Jacks and Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965), are haunted by the intertwining of those two emotional scars: his personal tragedy is seen in economic terms, and economic degradation is seen as intensely personal. A poem from Hugo's second book, "Houses Lie, Believe the Lying Sea," indicates the depth at which those two scars join. (pp. 43-5)

[In this poem] Hugo's experience in the abandoned house stands as a paradigm for those other images, scattered through so many poems, of shacks, tenements, peeling slats, and rooms that don't feel right. In such poems as "Hideout," "Between the Bridges," "No Bells to Believe," and "Kapowsin," the houses or buildings stand, sometimes barely, as aspects of failure highlighted by the power and beauty of the natural landscape, often the sea. Critically, an opposition between the poverty of Hugo's neighborhood and the wealth of West Seattle may be implied in such contrasts between ruined buildings and rich natural imagery, but the image of the sea is used in a more complex way. The sea beyond the poor houses is rich, inaccessible, and powerful, and its power is as inaccessible to money as it is to poverty. The poor, in their feeling for their lives and surroundings, do have some claim on the power of the sea; they are tied to it economically and even literally, as they live along the banks of the river that leads to it.

Not merely metaphor, the sea is a tangible presence that demands the attention of all workers in Riverside and Youngstown, fishermen or mill workers. Whatever their fathers do, the boys of those neighborhoods fish and learn that men have fights in taverns by the river. This is the ethic that Hugo, left mainly alone by his grandparents, adopted as a means to survive. An unquestioned power in his life, the sea becomes part of the psychological landscape of his poetry.

Very much a part of the experience of poverty, the almost palpable sensation of being tied to a landscape or seascape that provides jobs, work, and a way to survive has been studied by psychiatrist Robert Coles in his monumental work, Children of Crisis. (pp. 46-7)

There are obvious connections between the emotional lives that Coles has described and the life that Hugo has spoken of in his poetry and prose: the same hurt, sense of worthlessness, boredom, need, and momentary release from the necessity of work. Though his life, even during the Depression, was not characterized by the utter desolation of the migrants' lives, Hugo can claim the feelings of the very poor as his own partly through the heightening effect of the personal desertions in his life. With his greater sense of self and easier economic life, he gains strength to look at his and others' poverty and to feel his way to a language that adequately expresses that pain.

For Hugo the pain goes deeper than the poverty that engenders it. The psychological dislocation that arises from a childhood desertion can create the same sense of degradation and unworthiness that underlay the surrounding experience of poverty in his neighborhood. The two worlds, outside the house and inside the home, are connected by that same spoiled water of failure and humiliation. The psychological hurt complements the economic need; the constant burden of work is like the constant search for a sense of self-worth; the anger toward money and prestige parallels the deep internal anger arising from being betrayed and deserted. (pp. 47-8)

As the migrant children do, Hugo must learn to work with what he has. His being reared by his grandparents shaped his sense of self and his relation to the society around him. It also left him with a developed sensitivity to the fragility of life for the old and with the greater sense of boredom for a boy brought up among tired and defeated people. (p. 48)

The presence of the old—whether people, objects, or even ideas—is widespread in Hugo's poetry. At times the land itself is old, something our contemporary culture is losing sight of, like a road along the interstate highway. Certainly houses are old, as in "Houses Lie, Believe the Lying Sea." What is old needs attention, affection, understanding, and help. The old have as fragile and precarious an existence as does a young boy; in Hugo's poetry this attention to the old is not the expression of some predisposed ethic but a necessary part of the poet's coming to know himself. (p. 49)

Hugo's sensitivity to the old is tied to an awareness of the abuses of power: "the value of the old" is a problem linked with "the value of the cruel." In this poem, placed in Indiana at a safe distance from Seattle, Hugo can have moments of fun with the problem, can show the mixed feeling of "on that plate, a rose survives the cracks" and "Let's run and love the old and know tomorrow / whatever trails our running leaves in air / a tiny crone will price and call antique." But the poem ends on a more ominous note: an antique doughboy levels his bayonet "level as your frown / when salesmen come … their baskets heavy / with those bullets armies wouldn't buy." Behind the play of fragility and the small cruelties of age is something as powerful and as cruel as a pyromaniac and as economically unethical as a salesman trying to foist bad goods on unsuspecting customers.

"The value of the old" is an extension of Hugo's youthful sensitivity to his grandparents. Early in his poetic career he dealt with the important presence of his grandmother in "The Way a Ghost Dissolves." With her life bounded by hard work, need, faith, and age, she is seen by Hugo as a ghost. The imagery of the poem, though placed outdoors, reinforces an interior, "close" feeling by playing with those boundaries…. The ghost dissolves in an essentially passive acceptance of whatever comes. Behind the work is the earth's reaction, "provided," as if all of the woman's activity is circumscribed by that agrarian patience that has often given more to the land than it has gained in return. Hugo claims the life of this ghost as his own future.

         I will garden on the double run,
         my rhythm obvious in ringing rakes,
         and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind
 
         and work until my heart is short;
         then go out slowly with a feeble grin,
         my fingers flexing but my eyes gone gray
         from cramps and lack of oxygen.

The verbs outline the life set forth in the whole poem: "garden," "trust," "work," "go out," "gone." Early in his career Hugo sees his life locked in the same heartless working routine his grandparents had survived.

"The Way a Ghost Dissolves" is a touching and frightening poem: frightening in that such a life will be lived again, contained by a force so strong that a man can see his life set before him, closed in the same way that age closes the lives of us all. Such an emotional condition is nearly barren, even ghostly. Indeed the last image of the poem is simple suffocation. Surely there is some other life to imagine, something else for a young man to do.

There is: in the neighborhood outside the house where boys played themselves to toughness, jeering at Greek fishermen, hiding in abandoned mills, and finding fights. Many men have known this world while growing up…. (pp. 50-1)

One remembers an earlier Hugo statement: "When we were kids, making a living, even finding a job, was tough." For a boy who feels the effects of poverty and rejection, such an image can become the vehicle for several unspoken feelings: in a world where survival is a constant question, being tough can mean being someone who cannot be destroyed, who is not hurt deeply by the dangers that happen daily; someone who can go on, tap some power beyond that of normal beaten-down reality, and win. This tough, self-reliant masculinity grows to be a central image in Hugo's poetry: the archetypal western loner, so self-reliant, American, and tough that his emotional life feels gray like a jail, as in "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg."

But there is a dimension to masculine toughness that gains clairty when … compared to the guiding image of "The Way a Ghost Dissolves." A young boy must survive not only the tough world of poverty but also the passive acceptance of such a defeated life…. [In his poetry Hugo shows anger, an instinct to fight in whatever way he can to protect what self-worth he has.] That anger is a defense is now a psychological truism, but it is defense at the bottom line and therefore an emotional state that the poor know well.

"Neighbor" offers a masculine parallel to "The Way a Ghost Dissolves" and shows anger turned on itself in the image of a drunk lying flat in the garden that Hugo's grandmother worked devotedly…. It's funny, this parody of socially accepted manners, and Hugo makes the fun gentle and polite. As in any number of comic sketches, the drunk wants only to be liked and is so compliant that he has to be "helped and held." But this compliance masks—as Karen Horney pointed out in her famous study, Our Inner Conflicts—a lot of anger, a hatred so severe that a man may kill himself emotionally by bending over to deny its existence.

Getting drunk is a way to survive the hurt of poverty and the sense of worthlessness that develops into self-hatred. As Hugo imagines the scene, he identifies with the drunk, helps him, knows his habits and the shack where he lives. Later Hugo came to realize that "Neighbor" had been "no idle curiosity, no chance subject for a poem. I felt I might very well end up that way, and to this day the idea isn't unattractive." Such a statement demonstrates the depths of Hugo's sense of defeat and indicates the depth of struggle he has had with alcoholism. In this poem, resignation, defeat, and need combine to unlock a further area of the landscape of the imagination. (pp. 52-3)

[Anger] is just beneath the polite and comic surface; as it emerges we feel how well Hugo has unlocked this inner landscape, to bring the reader that mixture of disdain and sympathy evident in the final stanza.

        I hear he's dead, and wait now on my porch.
        He must be in his shack. The wagon's
        due to come and take him where they take
        late alcoholics, probably called Farm's End.
        I plan my frown, certain he'll be carried out
        bleeding from the corners of his grin….

Most of the language is almost casual, but there is an underlying care: the wagon is "due to come," and the unseen officials will take the neighbor "where they take / late alcoholics"—the assonance and word choice are gentle, in fact, polite. They add a heavy irony to the casual prose of "probably called Farm's End," and we remember the drunk at the beginning of the poem, face down in the beets. The frown the poet assumes is protective, a social mask meant to insulate him from the bloody image certain to come into view as the drunk is carried out.

The way "Neighbor" carefully traces the connections of inner landscape and social failure shows us how deeply Hugo is aware of the pity and anger that are the emotional condition of the poor. Like the poor in Coles's book, Hugo's drunk feels a resignation and a loss of self-esteem that make him keep his place and be polite. And, as Coles described it, beneath the resignation is rage, directed more often toward self than toward society. The imaginative power of that rage is unlocked in Hugo's poetry. Anger seems to be a force welling from the unconscious, taking landscapes or figures of loss and poverty and making them felt presences, momentarily made whole as that anger raises them up to full height and then allows them to collapse. A major source of Hugo's poetry, that deep rage beneath the surface pity and politeness of the poor is both let loose and channeled in the language of the poems. The drunk does not control his rage; he is controlled and killed by it. The poet, in making the patterns of sound and images that are the poem, controls his own anger by triggering the release of that emotional energy that can kill. It is an imaginative act that asks for and evokes a fundamental sympathy on the part of the reader as the unlocking of the inner landscape becomes an occasion for the sharing of emotional health.

With Hugo's first two books we find a statement and an exploration of the inner landscape of poverty. In A Run of Jacks that statement is clear; the emotional scars of poverty are evident. In Death of the Kapowsin Tavern the statement takes on larger dimensions and assumes a regional outline that identifies the Pacific Northwest with the landscape of poverty and anger. There are moments, of course, when the burden of past hurt lifts and the sheer natural energy and beauty of the regional landscape are an illumination. But not all discoveries are beautiful and not all illuminations carry with them the confidence that the world is beautiful and right. There are drunks in taverns, rivers full of crud, and shacks where boys leave home early and never want to go back. The energy in Hugo's poetry owes much of its richness to that hurt that carries the weight of pain from the experience of poverty. (pp. 53-4)

Michael S. Allen, in his We Are Called Human: The Poetry of Richard Hugo, The University of Arkansas Press, 1982, 158 p.