ABSTRACT
With his first volume Ted Hughes announced his major themes in a voice that, while being strikingly individual, also betrayed rather too conspicuously its influences. What was remarkable at the time was that neither themes nor voice were recognisable as the then fashionable mode of Movement poetry. Rather, this first volume seemed to deliberately challenge the urbane attitudes and tentative voices of Movement poets such as Robert Conquest, John Wain and Philip Larkin. The Hawk in the Rain (1957) evoked powerful forces in external nature and in human nature. It seemed to suggest not just that each could be understood by reference to the other, but that there was a kind of natural continuity between the raw energy of the hawk and the first passion of a lover, or between the spent energy of a caged lion and that of a now ‘wrecked’ famous poet, or between the self-delusive energy of the caged jaguar and that of the human ‘egghead’, or between the mysterious, distinctive vitality of a fox and that creative force which produces a poem with a life of its own.
