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Essay on Ted Hughes
After the Second World War most English poetry focused on aesthetic or social rather than political problems. While the postwar era was not a great period of English literature, an influential poet of the period includes Ted Hughes (Crow, 1970; Birthday Letters, 1997), who was poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, and educated at Cambridge University. He worked in various jobs as a gardener, security guard, film reader, and teacher. Birthday Letters (1998) is a collection of poems written at various times, following the course of his seven-year marriage to the US poet Sylvia Plath.
His harsh, postapocalyptic poetry celebrates simple survival. Hughes's best poetry focuses on the unsentimental within nature. His poems are marked by controlled diction and style, which create a sense of order and meaning in violent or passionate natural events, often in the world of animals. His work is characterized by its harsh portrayal of the crueller aspects of nature, by its reflection of the agonies of personal experience, and by the employment of myths of creation and being, as in Crow (1970) and Gaudete (1977).
The disturbing elements of 20th-century poet Ted Hughes's "Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" are examined, focusing on the implications of abandoning a human perspective. Topics include the book's brutal images, the tension between the poems and traditional cultural meanings, and psychological fragmentation, and the meaning to be found in painful situations.
Two aspects of Ted Hughes's Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow have proved hard to swallow for some critics, namely, the book's language and its imagery, or the pathological violence of its language, its anti-human ideas, its sadistic imagery. Hughes points out three things here, although it might be more accurate to speak of Crow's antiliberal humanist ideas...............
