Sources in the Work of Ted Hughes

Abstract

Ted Hughes' poetry is the chronicle of his quest for mana, the source of healing energies. Through a close examination of 'Cave Birds', 'Remains of Elmet', and 'River', this thesis attempts to demonstrate the way in which Hughes' recent poetic sequences document this quest and, also, show the increasing skill with which he uses Nature and her energies to achieve his re-creative poetic purposes. Hughes has strong views about the nature of the creative arts, their link with the all-powerful, natural, Universal Energies which he believes to be the source of life and death, and about the artist's ability to contact and, to some extent, control these energies. He sees every imaginative art as essentially part of the life of the artist who works with it, and as an expression of the artist's deepest thoughts, feelings and perceptions. He sees each, too, as a means of negotiating with the Energies and of exploring and experimenting with their destructive and creative powers for personal and/or altruistic purposes. Hughes' poetry, therefore, chronicles the ways in which he has approached such exploration and experimentation; it demonstrates, too, the increasing skill and ease with which he contacts the Energies and channels them imaginatively into our world. Hughes' ideas about the role of the artist and the creative arts in counteracting the sterile and destructive influences of rational and scientific thought in our society, and the efforts of Mankind to suppress the natural energies, to control nature and, consequently, to deny the old Goddess of Life, Love and Death, emerge strongly from his own writing. This thesis explores these ideas and the way in which they have increasingly led Hughes to regard the natural world as the source of imaginative stimuli imbued with powerful re-creative energy.