Hughes, Ted (Vol. 9) - Hughes, Ted 1930–
Hughes, Ted 1930–
Hughes is an English poet, playwright, editor, and writer of books for children. He is a nature poet in the sense that his poems express, in their descriptions of wildlife and landscape, the brutal savagery of nature. (See also CLC, Vols. 2, 4, Children's Literature Review, Vol. 3, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
[The] real limitation of Hughes's animal poems is precisely that they conjure emotions without bringing us any nearer to understanding them. They borrow their impact from a complex of emotions that they do nothing to define, and in the end tell us nothing about the urban and civilised human world that we read the poems in. If they reach back, "as in a dream", to a nexus of fear and sensation, this is just the point and the reason why they frequently fail as poetry: one difference between dreams and art is that art deepens our understanding while dreams on their own do not. Larkin's...
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