Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins

Abstract

Despite the quantity of critical attention lavished on Ted Hughes’s work, very little has been said about the origins and originality of his poetic ‘voice’ and trademark style, as it appeared in The Hawk in the Rain (1957). This essay argues that while this is, to some extent, the result of Hughes covering his tracks, a good deal of it is also due to the fact that his roots lie deep in the much-excoriated and still critically under-investigated Apocalypse poets of the 1940s. It was familiarity with these, and particularly the work of its leading figure, Dylan Thomas, which provided the challenge and impetus for Hughes’s stylistic advances between 1954 and 1956, advances bolstered by his marriage to another Thomas devotee, Sylvia Plath. Rather than ‘reacting against’ the Movement, Hughes, more complexly, was a continuer of a visionary-apocalyptic tradition in British (and Irish) poetry which also includes Blake and Yeats, the basic coordinates of which he absorbed in his late teens and early twenties. Almost all of Hughes’s central concerns, from ecology to the damaging effects of hyper-rationality, can be traced to these allegiances, which he used to stretch and extend the scope of the British mainstream in such remarkable ways.