Introduction: A Tyrannical Reading of Ted Hughes

Abstract

Ted Hughes’s famous dream, whereby a burnt fox/man walks into his room, places a bloody handprint on his page and tells him, in effect, to stop writing essays if he wants to stop burning foxes, poses a direct challenge to the critic of Hughes. His formative dream, the dream that he tells in order to shape our idea of him as a poet, is a message to the critic that their work is destructive, the murder of poetry. This introduction opens with a defence of literary criticism, arguing that there is valid space for it in regard to Hughes’s work, particularly as he produced so much himself. It also places his work in the context of the ‘great European intellectual debate’ from which he exiles himself.