Paper claims Lowell’s earlier writings can be seen in Hughes’s poem Pike and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but her gender and sexuality made her unpopular

Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised. But Hughes’s image of a fish with “green tigering the gold” has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes “confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work” in a new paper.

According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians, which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures, Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems.

“In Lowell’s poem, ‘shadows’, ‘green-and-copper’, ‘under the reeds’, and ‘orange’ appear in sequence; in almost the same pattern, Hughes’s poem gives us ‘green tigering the gold’, ‘silhouette’ , ‘under the heat-struck lily pads’, and an ‘amber cavern’,” she writes, also highlighting the “echo” of Lowell’s line, “darkness and a gleam”, in the final line of Hughes’s poem: “Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed”.

“Readers would be forgiven for mistaking Lowell’s poem for a shorter draft of Pike, or for suggesting that Hughes confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work,” writes Roche.

Lowell was a rather large lady, a lesbian, a woman, so for all these reasons she’s unpopular, uncelebrated Dr Hannah Roche

She told the Guardian that she felt it was an “unacknowledged debt”: “I don’t want to use the word plagiarism, I don’t want to make this bold claim, but I do think the influence is there … It’s not just a similar subject, it’s the imagery he used, it’s the language,” she said.

“Here we see a celebrated male poet borrowing from a woman who was profoundly unpopular. She was a rather large lady, a lesbian, a woman, so for all these reasons she’s unpopular, uncelebrated, so it troubles me what Hughes has done. He didn’t acknowledge it and nobody has acknowledged it since.”

A spokesperson for the Ted Hughes estate denied that Hughes owed a debt to Lowell, saying that Pike grew out of the poet’s childhood experiences when his family moved to south Yorkshire in 1938 and he began to fish for pike at night in a pond by the site of an ancient monastery.

In the 1960s, Hughes wrote of how the poem was “one of my prize catches”. “I did most of my early fishing in a quite small lake, really a large pond. Recently I felt like doing some pike fishing … as I remembered the extreme pleasures of that sport, bits of [Pike] began to arrive. By looking at the place in my memory very hard and very carefully and by using the words that grew naturally out of the pictures and feelings, I captured not just a pike, I captured the whole pond, including the monsters I never even hooked,” wrote Hughes.

“It seems clear from Hughes’s own recollections here that his poem grew out of actual experience, and the estate’s view is that he owed no debt to Amy Lowell or her poem,” said the spokesperson.

But Roche said that while she believed the poem may have come to Hughes while fishing, she remained convinced that Lowell had also helped inspire it. “The evidence is there in the poems, if we read the two poems side by side, they’re remarkably similar. Hughes scholars would come back and say [his] Pike is a much better poem. I think it’s a longer poem but in terms of subject matter and in terms of the treatment … they’re remarkably similar. Obviously I have no proof Hughes was reading Lowell but, personally, I’m convinced he must have done,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A portrait of Lowell taken for Time Magazine in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

Born in Massachusetts in 1874, Lowell published more than 650 poems in her lifetime and won a posthumous Pulitzer prize for the collection What’s O’Clock. According to Roche’s paper, however, “by the end of the 20th century, [her] poetry had been all but erased from modernism, with her name resurfacing only in relation to her dealings with Ezra Pound, her distant kinship with Robert Lowell, or her correspondence with DH Lawrence”.

Lawrence, claims Roche’s paper, also “borrows” from Lowell, with the Sapphic bathing scenes in his novel The Rainbow drawing from Lowell’s poem In a Garden.

“And the wavering, pallid figure was beside her, a hand grasping her arm. And the elder held the younger close against her, close, as they went down, and by the side of the water, she put her arms round her, and kissed her,” writes Lawrence. “And I wished for night and you. / I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, / White and shining in the silver-flecked water. / While the moon rode over the garden, / High in the arch of night, / And the scent of lilacs was heavy with stillness. // Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing,” writes Lowell.

Roche believes that readers have been kept in the dark about Lowell’s contribution to modernist poetry. “Her poetry deserves a readership … She should definitely be read more widely, not just as a lesbian poet,” she said. “She deserves a readership outside the world of feminist scholarship.”