A Historical Perspective On Ted Hughes' Nature Poetry

Some critics hold that Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, is an "anti-war poet" while some propose that there is "the absence of history" in Hughes' works for his presentation of a primitive nature world in his poems. This thesis studies effect of historical events (mostly the two World Wars) to Ted Hughes' writing and discusses the conflicts arise in Modern England explored by him. In his poetry Hughes time and again celebrates the natural energies, shows how they exist in mankind, and points out that human wholeness depends on an acceptance of all aspects of our nature. During a prolific writing career, Hughes has been regarded as a poet who writes about the natural world rather than the society, but his "animal poems" are not only about the natural world, they also reflect human life. And the feral forces of nature he celebrates are metaphors for historical struggle of human being in modern world.Hughes was greatly impressed by the two World Wars and his writing was influenced by his father's experience in the First World War. The terrible experiences weighed on the father's mind and his attendant depression oppressed the boy throughout the period of his childhood and adolescence and affected his poetic imagination.War is a preoccupation of Hughes and his theme extends from the physical war to psycho field to explore both inner and outer world. Hughes was greatly influenced by the two World Wars although he seldom portrays explicit battlefield in his writing. It results in his poems as the battlefield of modern crisis that man has to face. There Hughes represents struggles between life and death, eternal and impermanence and exposes the trapped freedom, the caged liberty and the disillusionment of ideals. In this thesis the conflicts between man and nature, man and God, and modern urbanization and rural life will be discussed by analyzing the images Hughes creates in his nature poems. In all, Hughes' poems are thematically artistic abstraction of social life of his time, while artistically the crystallizations and documentation of his concepts and mind. Metaphorically his poetry is a piece of magic crystal, from which on one hand we could hear noise and chaos from monopolies and cities, rearing from machines; on the other hand we could feel drastic swell and increase of man's desires, the anger and counter—attack from all living things, the indignation and retaliation of Nature; and we could also sense the poet's worry, anxiety, resentment and expectation about the deteriorating reality and dangling future; what is more profound and striking in it is that as if we could hear an echoing voice of warning and prophet like the providence: Be kind with Nature and behave yourselves, Man! We can conclude, then, that in Hughes' poetry there contains reality, history, anxiety, aspiration, warning, prophet, and a prescription for the suffering human beings from the harmful effects of industrialization, urbanization and swelling desires and ambition.