ABSTRACT
Ted Hughes was a proud Yorkshireman, brought up not quite in the country and not quite in the town. However, he was not a “man on the edge,” but a man “on the border,” using poetic language rooted in his home county to exploit his liminal status. Some poets embrace a position of wilful obscurantism or linguistic difficulty to emphasize their status as “other.” However, Hughes did not feel such a need, disciplining his language to reach as wide an audience as possible; yet “every attitude showing its bone and every mouth confessing its crude shire,” as he put it in the poem “Soliloquy.” Dialect words, rhythms, and verbal patterns were deeply foundational to his poetry. They contributed heavily to the effectiveness of a major poet’s enduring work. While never a dialect poet, Hughes’s Yorkshire permeated the entire corpus of his work, spoken voice and poetic voice united as one.
