“What Am I?”

This chapter presents animal studies and archival manuscript analysis of the process of writing in order to re-think how and why animals appear with such frequency in Ted Hughes’s work and to reassess what an animal is in his poetry. It addresses Hughes’s manuscript drafts to track how the voice and subject of the poems oscillate between the human and the animal. Most of the animals in Hughes’s famous early animal poems fit into two broad categories: animals of the mind and animals of the body. The claws that “trickle” over the palm imply the speaker’s stillness, and the encounters with these animals are generally harmonious. The early drafts contain none of the animal encounters of the final poem; Hughes brings in these elements part way through the drafting and, once present, they change very little in subsequent drafts.