Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-17T06:11:00.755Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Hughes and animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

Chen Hong
Affiliation:
Central China Normal University, Wuhan
Terry Gifford
Affiliation:
Bath Spa University
Get access

Summary

Hughes’s poetry from his first book to the last can be regarded as expressing one poet’s personal myth of his quest for what Keith Sagar has called ‘healing truths’ that both he himself and his society needed. For Hughes the poet, one way of achieving such insights is by taking a shamanistic approach to thinking and writing about animals. In one of his letters to Moelwyn Merchant in 1990, Hughes explains his long-standing interest in shamanism and the role of animals in it. He said that it was actually shamanism that had helped him see the connection between ‘everything that concerned [him]’, such as his ‘preoccupation with animal life’, his mythologies and a series of his recurring dreams (LTH 579). And underneath them all, what he found was a deeper connection between animal life and the divine world, a world that animals have always been living in and that humans are separated from, a world that is sometimes termed ‘the animal/spiritual consciousness’. In Hughes’s view, what he called ‘the divine being’ is the state of a shaman whose cultural ego has collapsed and who has then plunged back into an animal/spiritual consciousness that is not only his own, but that of his whole group.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Hughes and animals
    • By Chen Hong, Central China Normal University, Wuhan
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Hughes and animals
    • By Chen Hong, Central China Normal University, Wuhan
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Hughes and animals
    • By Chen Hong, Central China Normal University, Wuhan
  • Edited by Terry Gifford, Bath Spa University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes
  • Online publication: 28 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521197526.004
Available formats
×