Introduction

Abstract

Our understanding of the work of Ted Hughes has reached an interesting stage. After the pioneering sweeps through the work to explicate Hughes’ remarkably consistent but creatively evolving vision, first begun by Keith Sagar in 1972,¹ revisionist attention is now being given in more depth to the questions, paradoxes and riddles inherent in Hughes’ vision(s) and the subtleties of their expression. Consideration of any small mysterious corner of Hughes’ work, perhaps only lightly touched upon by previous critics, can quickly take the reader on a lightning journey to the charged centre of his concerns. And this works both ways. If the Collected Poems is the core (and perhaps the single most important book of poetry for our own century that was written in the last), the journey to any neglected part of the periphery of his work is but a hummingbird’s wingbeat.