Animal imagery in Ted Hughes' poetry

Abstract EN

The first thing to be encountered in Ted Hughes' poetry, who is one of the great modern poets in English literature, is his preoccupation with animals like horses, foxes, otters, crow, jaguar and deer that are included as title subjects for his poems.

His poems deal with animals and nature and the savagery of both.

And at the same time he uses animals to show the beastly ways of human beings.

He creates in his poems senses of both anarchy and surrealism to make clear and safe the distance between the fantasy he creates and reality.

Hughes admires the positive qualities in the animals he describes because he has sympathy for the more violent and elemental human impulses.

His writing about animals and birds is due to the fact that he finds in them the unsophisticated vitality than urban man who is in danger of losing it.

Also the animals he describes try to survive the murderous attacks of man that symbolizes the attempts of beauty, passion and natural instincts to survive in an artificial society.