Hughes and urbanity

Seamus Perry

pp. 231-244

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

Abstract

Ted Hughes was a wild man, or at least his imagination dwelt most readily and habitually within the company of the wild: this much is common knowledge. And it is certainly true that he liked, no doubt needed, to cast himself in the role of a tendentiously ungenteel thing, in life as well as in art, a rough creature out of tune with more polite contemporary modes.