Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 6 – The Wuthering Heights one

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With Margot Robbie as Cathy in the latest iteration of Wuthering Heights, your hosts argue that without poetry Emily Brontë’s book wouldn’t have been written. 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, Pele Cox and Rich Uridge 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 Romantics such as Shelley and Byron – the very poets Brontë would have been reading at Haworth parsonage in the years before she penned Wuthering Heights.

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Poets
A portrait of Emily Bronte
Further reading
Rich writes…

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. I’ll be posting a link to a reading of the whole poem shortly. You’ll hear then 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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