Hughes and War Trauma

Abstract

This chapter opens with a discussion of the parallels between ‘The Burnt Fox’ and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, before going on to explore the way in which war exerts lasting pressure on Hughes’s poetry. World War I, in which his father and uncles fought, shapes his imagination, giving rise to the battle with evocation that defines much of Hughes’s poetry. Silence is both integral and challenging to Hughes’s war poetry, and became a particularly contentious issue in poetry after World War II with Theodor Adorno’s provocation that writing poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric. This chapter addresses the ways in which Hughes’s later biographical poetry appropriates World War II as a means to discuss his own personal traumas, exploring the ethical as well as the stylistic traits of this aspect of his work.