The nature of Englishness

the hybrid poetics of Ted Hughes

Vidyan Ravinthiran

pp. 107-123

in: Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald, Terry Gifford (eds), Ted Hughes, nature and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

"Strawberry Hill" tries to imagine a suppressed wildness at the heart of English, and Englishness, equally expressed—the poem seems to argue—by a Restoration stoat dancing on the lawns of Horace Walpole's villa, and the slang of black immigrants in contemporary Brixton. Overkeen to press its point home, there's a moment where the poem's failure to do so acknowledges a cultural diversity resisting of Hughes's method. This is true, too, of "Shibboleth", a neglected lyric from Capriccio (1990), and this essay moves from one to the other, also considering Hughes on race, and nationality, elsewhere.