The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald

Abstract

Many contemporary poets have read, discussed and been influenced by Ted Hughes’s work. However, Alice Oswald’s engagment with Hughes’s poetry and criticism has been distinctly complex. In her interviews and critical writing, Oswald’s references to Hughes reveal how she has read—and often deliberately misread—his work in order to distance herself from a tradition of nature poetry and to make a statement about her own poetics. In her poetry, her allusions to Hughes extend from subtle stylistic echoes to significant parallels between their conceptions of poetic sound and lyrical voice. Indeed, I will end the chapter by arguing that Oswald’s use of Hughes in her poetry has wider implications for understanding not only the influence Hughes has had on the development of contemporary Anglo-American poetry, but also how these textual references, allusions and borrowings complicate theoretical models of influence and intertextuality.