Green Laureate

Abstract

The years 1984–1992 saw some of Hughes’s most sustained campaigning. After he became Laureate late in 1984, he was able to use the recognition he gained to sell his protest poems to major national newspapers, widely disseminating their message. Trips to Kenya and Egypt deepened his sense of environmental issues abroad; Hughes’s diaries from Kenya are analysed for the first time in this chapter. He openly criticised politicians who did not do enough for the environment, befriended prominent Conservatives, lobbied those in power with letters, and sent an environmental book to the Prime Minister. The environmental poetry that Hughes produced during this time is not always his best, but newly available materials from the archives give a full picture of his involvement in founding Arts for Nature in 1988, and the Sacred Earth Drama Trust’s children’s writing competition in 1990. As Gifford’s research has shown, Hughes campaigned determinedly against the pollution of the Torridge Estuary from 1984, and supported his friend Ian Cook’s high-profile 1992 court case against South West Water. With the publication of his children’s environmental fable The Iron Woman in 1993, he broadcast his concern about water pollution and waste, and articulated his respect for women’s environmentalism.