Arbieroo reviewed Collected poems by Ted Hughes
Review of 'Collected poems' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Ted Hughes is probably the greatest British post-WWII poet and possibly the best of the 20th Century. He would have been significant if he had only ever produced his debut collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in which he rescued nature observation from the Romantics, bringing a post-Darwinian sensibility to foxes, horses, hawks, jaguars and more. Subsequent collections continued this theme with robust, sometimes brutal language deployed to acheive his aims. The a-moral savagery of the Hawk Roosting represents a pinacle of this type of poem which he continued to write late into his career, despite the pessimism of the Monster constantly asked to "repeat that."
Poems about plants and animals are not all he will be remembered for - far from it: he brought us Crow, the Trickster God of Pacific Northwest native American tribes, creating myths for the 20th Century. Taking a contemporary Western cultural mileiu of secular …
Ted Hughes is probably the greatest British post-WWII poet and possibly the best of the 20th Century. He would have been significant if he had only ever produced his debut collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in which he rescued nature observation from the Romantics, bringing a post-Darwinian sensibility to foxes, horses, hawks, jaguars and more. Subsequent collections continued this theme with robust, sometimes brutal language deployed to acheive his aims. The a-moral savagery of the Hawk Roosting represents a pinacle of this type of poem which he continued to write late into his career, despite the pessimism of the Monster constantly asked to "repeat that."
Poems about plants and animals are not all he will be remembered for - far from it: he brought us Crow, the Trickster God of Pacific Northwest native American tribes, creating myths for the 20th Century. Taking a contemporary Western cultural mileiu of secular anthropology, humanity viewed through the eyes of animal behaviourists, technology and evolution again, Hughes produces miniature legends of a confused, violent Black Beast and a God that dispairs of him, that encapsulate truths of our contemporary world neatly, many with a twisted, often acidicly ironic kink in their tail feathers.
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