Hughes, Ecocriticism and Ecopoetry

Abstract

This chapter evaluates past interpretations of Hughes’s environmental engagement by Owen Johnson (1991), Leonard Scigaj (1994), Terry Gifford (1995), Jonathan Bate (2000, 2015), Lawrence Buell (2003), Keith Sagar (2009), Susanna Lidström (2015) and Samuel Solnick (2016), finding that their work needs to be supplemented by further insights from the archives and engagement with new developments in ecopoetics. The chapter applies the work of major thinkers in the rapidly growing field of ecopoetics, such as Harriet Tarlo and Jonathan Skinner, to Hughes’s writing. These ecopoetics scholars propose an ecologically engaged poetry that has certain formal characteristics, such as echoing the sounds of nature (Skinner 2015) or an open form that mirrors the landscape (Tarlo 2011). Theories by ecocritics Susanna Lidström and Greg Garrard (2014) are brought into dialogue with Skinner’s seminal work on the varieties of ecopoetry (2005). Ecocritical theory has sometimes privileged poetry over other literary genres (Bate 2000; Felstiner 2010), yet Hughes’s prose and plays, and recent developments in experimental environmental writing, show that other literary forms need to be viewed as equally important. Exciting new theories that challenge conventional concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, published by thinkers such as USA-based ecocritic Timothy Morton (2007, 2010), and British theorist of the Anthropocene Timothy Clark (2015), are deployed to illuminate our understanding of Hughes’s poetry of ecological interconnectedness and human interference in the environment.