ABSTRACT
Ted Hughes’s work both challenges and defines the way we think about the aesthetics of children’s poetry in major ways. This is not only because Hughes thought so deeply about the distinctive nature of child readers and writing for children throughout his life (indeed, more than half the volumes of creative work that he published were for children). It is also because, although he began with lighter forays into the domain of children’s verse, his persistent engagement led him to reconceive the poetic ground on which the ancient affiliation between the child and nature was based. There have, of course, been many excellent poets writing for children who have drawn inspiration and material from the vital imaginative cords connecting chil - dren with animals and the natural world. Some have arguably been more formally innovative or developed a poetic voice more strongly inflected towards children’s culture. But none offers quite the same challenge that Hughes’s work does for the child reader, nor probes the interconnection between the child and nature at the same level. Terry Gifford has claimed that Hughes achieved “a complex vision of nature that has gone beyond that of other contemporary writers” (136), while for Morag Styles, Hughes’s children’s verse “shies away from conventional expectations of poetry, deviating from other nature poets today” (256). In Hughes’s work, she goes on to assert, “nature poetry for children comes of age” (257).
