Research Gateway

Abstract

In 1956, just a year before Ted Hughes’s first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, appeared; Robert Conquest published an anthology of contemporary poetry called New Lines. In the introduction of that anthology Conquest comments on the language of the contemporary poets: “We see refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous and emotional intent”. In contrast to this observation Conquest appreciates Ted Hughes’s language which is essentially a makeshift, slippery, and unstable; almost structured like unconscious mind. This paper intends to explore Ted Hughes’s use of language, in particularly crow poems, that has been somehow overlooked in spite of a great wealth of criticism focusing on mostly the thematic aspects.