This essay offers an ecocritical reading of Hughes’s poetic career. First, ecocriticism is defined and the successive ‘waves’ of its development outlined. In contrast to Larkin’s ‘Movement’ poetry, the case is made for Hughes’s work as post-pastoral poetry that seeks to counter nostalgic idealisation of the countryside, its inhabitants and its elemental forces. Hughes’s first two volumes, The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, satirise pastoral defences against the forces of nature, but also celebrate the ‘elemental power circuit of the universe’ at work in the inner life of humans, animals and landscapes. Wodwo then seriously extends these themes. Between critique and celebration of forces in the human and more than human worlds, the course of Hughes’s poetic career was remarkably consistent, despite the variety of forms that each volume took, from the mythic narratives of Crow and Cave Birds to the shamanic verse narrative of Gaudete, the georgic poetry of Moortown Diary, the cultural organicism of Remains of Elmet and the redemptive achievement of River. The maturity of these three latter volumes deepens both language and themes. Even in Birthday Letters, Hughes and his late wife, Sylvia Plath, can be seen to be defined by their different responses to the natural world.
The distinctive feature of this essay is the way in which ecocritical concepts are revealing of aspects of Hughes’s poetry: pastoral, post-pastoral, otherness, inhabitation, biosemiology, ecofeminism, material ecocriticism, agency, natureculture and re-enchantment. These concepts are defined in the context of specific texts. Consideration is also given to poetry written ‘within hearing of children’, as Hughes put it, together with reference to Hughes’s poetic translation of Tales from Ovid. The significance of Hughes’s influence upon Alice Oswald and the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, is emphasised as twenty-first-century poets and readers engage with the consequences of the Anthropocene.
