A Study of Human and Animal Imagery in the Poems of Ted Hughes

Abstract

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) began his career as a poet with the publication of The Hawk in the Rain in 1957. He was labelled as “an animal poet”. The cause of disintegration in modern man is his cutting from the elemental nature of his own. Modern man appears to be Yeats’s ‘falcon’ (Yeats, line 2) that goes on decentring himself without cognition and getting absent-minded of the life-force, ‘the elemental power circuit of the universe’. Science and technology lead to reasoning, and reasoning leads to scepticism, and scepticism creeps into human brain (the egg-head) and causes man to question the validity of spirituality and morality. It is this which has been focussed in this article.