From Mytholmroyd to Mexborough: Origins of Hughes’s Environmental Awareness

Abstract

The young Hughes spent much of his time capturing animals with his brother, by shooting or trapping. When he moved to South Yorkshire at the age of eight, he began to become more selective about the species he killed, and to treat rarer animals with compassion—but contrary to what he himself writes in Winter Pollen, he did not stop shooting completely. His reading of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter and Roderick Haig-Brown’s novels about salmon exposed him to early conservationist ideas. It was also in South Yorkshire that he witnessed the death of fish due to silage pollution. Some of Hughes’s early hunting and fishing poems are analysed in this Chapter for the first time, and newly available archival materials illustrate Hughes’s longing for a ‘wild, natural world’ behind the ‘industrial depression’ of 1940s Yorkshire.