ABSTRACT
Two themes dominate the youth of Ted Hughes: his fascination with wildlife and his early sense of himself as a future writer and poet. Both might have been thought unlikely, given Hughes’s upbringing in the two different industrial areas of first West Yorkshire and then South Yorkshire. But the young Hughes’s sense of being most alive in the countryside (easily accessible from each of his two childhood homes), a supportive family and nurturing state schools provided him with opportunities that were to shape his life’s work. All of his resources as a writer of poetry, fiction, literary studies, book reviews, translations, letters and children’s works are aimed at exploring the tensions and connections between our inner nature and the external nature, in both of which Hughes believed that we must find a way to be at home. Hughes’s constructions in his work of a range of figures such as the fox, the wodwo, Crow, the Iron Man, the moors, a river, Shakespeare’s goddess, Alcestis, Sylvia Plath and himself are all observed with a naturalist’s attention and a storyteller’s sense of aiming his construction towards healing the gap between inner and outer nature. Hughes said that when writing for children he knew that there were fewer defences thrown up across that gap: ‘the audience is still open’ (Kazzer 1999: 193). It is clear that in his own childhood he was increasingly ‘at home’ within the family, the countryside, schooling and the connections between them.
