Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet

Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet
Author: Yvonne Reddick
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2017-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319591770

This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes’s understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in ‘green’ ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library’s new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics.

Nature, Environment and Poetry

Nature, Environment and Poetry
Author: Susanna Lidström
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2015-06-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317682858

The environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is in poetry, designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus and rationale. This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation. This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney

Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture

Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture
Author: Neil Roberts
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2018-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319975749

The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes’s proposition that ‘every child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments — political, as well as geographical — which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, ‘the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’.

The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children

The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children
Author: Lorraine Kerslake
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351330586

Despite the fame Ted Hughes’s poetry has achieved, there has been surprisingly little critical writing on his children’s literature. This book identifies the importance of Hughes’s children’s writing from an ecocritical perspective and argues that the healing function that Hughes ascribes to nature in his children’s literature is closely linked to the development of his own sense of environmental responsibility. This book will be the first sustained examination of Hughes’s greening in relation to his writing for children, providing a detailed reading of Hughes’s children’s literature through his poetry, prose and drama as well as his critical essays and letters. In addition, it also explores how Hughes’s children’s writing is a window to the poet’s own emotional struggles, as well as his environmental consciousness and concern to reconnect a society that has become alienated from nature. This book will be of great interest to not only those studying Ted Hughes, but also students and scholars of environment and literature, ecocriticism, children’s literature and twentieth-century literature.

Anthropocene Poetry

Anthropocene Poetry
Author: Yvonne Reddick
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2023-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031393899

Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respond to this time of crisis. From the canonical work of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, to award-winning poets Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, this book explores major figures from the past alongside acclaimed contemporary voices. It reveals Seamus Heaney’s support for conservation causes and Ted Hughes’s astonishingly forward-thinking research on climate change; it discusses how Pascale Petit has given poetry to Extinction Rebellion and how Karen McCarthy Woolf set sail with scientists to write about plastic pollution. This book deploys research on five poetry archives in the UK, USA and Ireland, and the author’s insider insights into the commissioning processes and collaborative methods that shaped important contemporary poetry publications. Anthropocene Poetry finds that environmental poetry is flourishing in the face of ecological devastation. Such poetry speaks of the anxieties and dilemmas of our age, and searches for paths towards resilience and resistance.

Ted Hughes in Context

Ted Hughes in Context
Author: Terry Gifford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2018-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110869022X

Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime's reading, interests and experience gave him access. The achievement of Ted Hughes as one of the major poets of the twentieth century is complimented by his growing reputation as a writer of letters, plays, literary criticism and translations. In addition, Hughes made important contributions to education, literary history, emergent environmentalism and debates about life writing. Ted Hughes in Context brings together thirty-four contributors who inform new readings of the works, and conceptualize Hughes's work within long-standing critical traditions while acknowledging a new awareness of his future importance. This collection offers consideration not only of the most important aspects of Hughes's work, but also the most neglected.

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them
Author: Jennifer D. Ryan-Bryant
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793614164

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table examines early draft manuscripts and published poems by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in order to uncover the compositional approaches that they held in common. Both poets not only honed the minutiae of individual poems but also reworked the shape of overall sequences in order to cultivate unique theories of an ars poetica. The book incorporates drafts of their work from Indiana University’s Lilly Library, Emory University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Smith College’s Mortimer Rare Book Room, and the British Library. After assessing the writing and revision strategies that the poets’ early drafts reveal, the book investigates the material that they borrowed from one another and then reimagined through two major sequences: Plath’s Ariel and Hughes’s Crow. The book enhances its analysis of the poets’ shared techniques by discussing several pairs of poems from Ariel and Hughes’s Birthday Letters that respond to one another. Its final chapter also includes an evaluation of some of Hughes’s unpublished journal entries and unpublished letters that comment on his last collection’s public reception. In the conclusion, the author chronicles Hughes’s and Plath’s own remarks on their writing process as further evidence of their ars poetica.

Studying English Literature in Context

Studying English Literature in Context
Author: Paul Poplawski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 675
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108787487

Ranging from early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection explores the myriad ways in which literary texts are informed by their historical contexts. The thirty-one chapters draw on varied themes and perspectives to present stimulating new readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts and authors. Written in a lively and engaging style, by an international team of experts, these specially commissioned essays collectively represent an incisive contribution to literary studies; they will appeal to scholars, teachers and graduate and undergraduate students. The book is designed to complement Paul Poplawski's previous volume, English Literature in Context, and incorporates additional study elements designed specifically with undergraduates in mind. With an extensive chronology, a glossary of critical terms, and a study guide suggesting how students might learn from the essays in their own writing practices, this volume provides a rich and flexible resource for teaching and learning.

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes
Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062643703

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain’s most important poets. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes’s life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.