The Environmental Revolution

Abstract

In the early 1960s, Hughes began writing folkloric poems about the character Crow, and his collection in progress Crow became an attempt to write about Plath’s death ‘obliquely’ (Sagar 2012). Further personal traumas in 1969 meant that he was unable to finish the poems for Crow. Archival materials, analysed in Chapter 6 for the first time, show that Hughes originally intended to give his collection a redemptive ending, involving ‘world repair’. However, the unfinished collection that he published is, in fact, more adequate for our environmental predicament. This chapter examines the Crow poems with reference to Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’, to recent research from the field of waste studies, and to contemporary developments in environmental thinking catalysed by the Vietnam War and the space race. In the winter of 1969, Hughes and his friends launched Your Environment, which boasted that it was Britain’s first environmental magazine. The present book is the first to analyse how Your Environment magazine contributed to Hughes’s knowledge of environmental problems, such as water pollution, declining fish stocks and endangered species. But Hughes was doing far more than just writing about the environment. This book contributes the new insight that his first environmental campaign was a proposal for a children’s tree-planting scheme in 1972.