‘Mindless violence’ or metaphor?

‘Everybody knows that Ted Hughes’s subject is violence.’ By the time the opening words of this ‘reappraisal’ of Hughes were written in 1965 the association of Hughes’s poetry with violence was so firmly established that such a remark could seem a statement of the obvious. What was far from obvious and settled, though, was what the nature and meaning of this violence was: the essay in which the above remark appears is one of a series of critical articles and exchanges at this time concerning this question. The early debates about Hughes’s poetry register something of the shock of Hughes’s first two books, The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960). In particular, the contentious nature of these debates about representations of ‘natural’ violence in Hughes, the sense of something radically new being grappled with, suggests that it is not simply ‘nature’ that is at stake here: ‘nature’ in these books, it will turn out, has a social and even political meaning.

In an early review of The Hawk in the Rain Edwin Muir used the phrase ‘admirable violence’ in relation to the imagery of this ‘remarkable’ new poet, a poet ‘quite outside the currents of his time’. The adjective ‘admirable’ anticipates, if not provokes, the debates that soon follow regarding the moral — or amoral — qualities of Hughesian violence (many critics would be quick to find the violence less than admirable).