‘Join Water’: Hughes’s River-Poetry

Abstract

Hughes saw rivers as primal conduits to the core of our inner nature. Protecting rivers was a key motive for Hughes’s environmental campaigns against water pollution—primarily due to his love of fishing. He was considering environmental problems in both local fishing-spots in Devon and landscapes farther afield, in Alaska, Scotland and Ireland. River is the summit of Hughes’s ecopoetic achievement. This book celebrates environmentally conscious practices, and criticises river pollution, without lapsing into the awkwardness of Hughes’s ‘semi-protest’ verse. But the publication of the volume itself fulfilled an explicitly environmental agenda: it was funded by British Gas and the Countryside Commission. This is a very significant development in his environmentalism; after he received the Laureateship, Hughes would continue to deploy poetry as a surprisingly effective means of raising awareness of environmental problems and funds for environmental causes.