Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 1-19

3. Hughes, Ecocriticism and Ecopoetry

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 21-55

4. From Mytholmroyd to Mexborough: Origins of Hughes’s Environmental Awareness

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 57-72

5. ‘Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness’: Hughes’s ‘Green’ Literary Influences

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 73-103

6. Animal Agency, America and Early Environmental Views

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 105-148

7. The Environmental Revolution

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 149-183

8. Hughes’s Farming

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 185-211

9. ‘Join Water’: Hughes’s River-Poetry

   • Yvonne Reddick

   Pages 213-244

10. Green Laureate

    • Yvonne Reddick

    Pages 245-267

11. Global Environmentalism

    • Yvonne Reddick

    Pages 269-287

12. Hunting, Shooting, Fishing—and Conservation?

    • Yvonne Reddick

    Pages 289-312

13. Conclusion

    • Yvonne Reddick

    Pages 313-317

14. Back Matter

    Pages 319-343

    PDF

This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes’s understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in ‘green’ ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library’s new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics.

• Ecocriticism
• Nature writing
• Verse
• Rhyme
• Rural
• Sylvia Plath

“The first book-length study of Hughes to focus entirely on his engagement with environmental and ecological issues. It is very thoroughly researched, lucidly written and critically acute. An important merit is that is examines each stage of Hughes’s career in historical context, thus avoiding anachronistic retrospective criticism. Perhaps the most important change it makes to our understanding of Hughes is that he emerges as a public intellectual, rather than the reclusive poet of popular perception.” (Neil Roberts, Emeritus Professor at Sheffield University, UK)

• University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

  Yvonne Reddick

Yvonne Reddick is Research Fellow in Modern English and World Literatures at University of Central Lancashire, UK, and she has previously held a research fellowship at the University of Warwick. She is a poet and scholar of literature and the environment. She won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and a Northern Writer’s Award in 2016, and her pamphlet Translating Mountains is now available.

Policies and ethics