ABSTRACT
I am going to talk about one of the most intimately personal aspects of Ted Hughes’s work: his writing for children. At its heart, as in most of his works for adults, lies his myth of the Goddess of Complete Being. Her laws shape and govern Hughes’s characters, motivate or animate them, while providing the overall background for his distinct cosmology. Embracing all human conflict, the laws of the Goddess are the ones to which his protagonists must adhere or ultimately fail. But they are also laws, this is also a cosmology, to which Hughes’s children’s writings offer a most open access and of which they give a surprisingly full account.
