ABSTRACT
In 1984 Ted Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate. Yet it would be easy to be heavy-handed when using terms such as ‘irony’ or ‘subversion’ in relation to Hughes’s role as Laureate. In the notes that Hughes provides to the collection of Laureate poems published in 1992 – Rain-Charm for the Duchy and other Laureate Poems – the poet speaks of his ‘boyhood fanatic patriotism’, while the volume as a whole is prefaced by the lines: A Soul is a wheel. That is, there is a strong sense in Hughes’s poems that in order to exorcise a ghost it must be allowed to speak, and Hughes’s biggest ghost is the First World War and the shock waves it sent through his family: Still spellbound by that oath at Agincourt, That palace jewel – the bullet Nelson bore.
