Ted Hughes’s Selected War Poems from Wodwoo and The Hawk in the Rain as a Reflection of the Atrocities and Sufferings of War
Ted Hughes’s Selected War Poems from Wodwoo and The Hawk in the Rain as a Reflection of the Atrocities and Sufferings of War
Sarah Hodeib (Phd)
د. سارة حديب
تاريخ الاستلام 26/3/2024 تاريخ القبول 26/4/2024
Abstract
War poetry emerged as a prominent literary genre at the onset of the 20th century, reflecting the profound impact of global conflicts on society and individual psyches. Ted Hughes, one of the most notable war poets, captures the essence of war’s brutality in his acclaimed collections, Wodwo and The Hawk in the Rain. This paper examines how Hughes’ war poems stand out as some of the most compelling examples of modern poetry, offering a raw and unflinching portrayal of the devastation, destruction, and atrocities associated with war. Hughes’ work serves a dual purpose: providing catharsis and redress as this paper tries to argue. Through vivid and often stark imagery, his poems address the haunting effects of war on both the guilty survivors and their traumatized descendants. These narratives resonate with the brutality of contemporary conflicts, making Hughes’ work a blunt exposition of war’s horrific consequences. This paper explores how Hughes’ poetry articulates the complex emotions tied to war and its aftermath, cementing his place as a pivotal figure in modern war poetry.
Keywords: War poetry, Ted Hughes, catharsis, trauma, contemporary conflicts, brutality, 20th century literature, modern poetry
الملخص
برزت قصائد الحرب كنوع أدبيّ بارز في بداية القرن العشرين، مما يعكس التّأثير العميق للصّراعات العالميّة في المجتمع والنّفوس الفرديّة. تيد هيوز، أحد أبرز شعراء الحرب، يلتقط جوهر وحشية الحرب في مجموعاته المشهورة “وودو” و”الصّقر في المطر”.
تبحث هذه الورقة في كيفية تميّز قصائد الحرب لهيوز كأمثلة من أكثر القصائد إقناعًا في الشّعر الحديث، حيث تقدّم تصويرًا خامًا وصريحًا للدّمار والخراب والفظائع المرتبطة بالحرب. يعمل هيوز من خلال قصائده على تحقيق هدفين: توفير التّطهير النّفسيّ والعلاج.
من خلال الصّور الحيّة والواضحة، تعالج قصائده الآثار المخيفة للحرب على النّاجين المذنبين وذريتهم المتضرّرة نفسيًا من جراء هذا الشّعور بالذّنب الموروث. تتناغم هذه السّرديّات مع وحشية الصّراعات المعاصرة، مما يجعل أعمال هيوز عرضًا صارخًا للعواقب الرّهيبة للحرب. يحاول هذا البحث إلقاء الضّوء على كيفية تعبير شعر هيوزو عن المشاعر المعقدة المرتبطة بالحرب وما بعدها، مما يرسخ مكانته كشخصية محورية في شعر الحرب الحديث.
الكلمات المفتاح: قصائد الحرب، تيد هيوز، التّطهير، الصّدمة، الصّراعات المعاصرة، الوحشية، أدب القرن العشرين، الشّعر الحديث
1.0 Introduction
With the start of the 20th century, wars became the potential destroyers of human kind, and with it came a horrific change in modern warfare. The advancement of weapons and the urgent call for the mighty nations to test their powers in a battlefield drove them to involve in wars like World War I and World War II that proved to be the immediate and most devastating elements of abolition to all: man, beast and mother earth.
Sadly, people don’t learn from their mistakes; the errors, human losses and mass destruction haven’t stopped them from the lustful pursuit of wars which is still depicted in the unfolding of a century and the beginning of another. The same thirst for blood still moves powerful nations to continue orchestrating systematic wars for their own profits; thus, the 21st century is just the same as its previous counterpart. In the Middle East, for example, which is a part of the globe that is cursed with instability, the Afghani, Iraqi, and Syrian wars were launched by the United States and the constant Israeli war launched against the helpless Palestinians whose land was usurped by the former. In Europe, which is believed to be a “better” geographical location, where people there are “luckier” or more “civilized”, a war has erupted between Ukraine and Russia that came as a slap on the faces of all the Western calls for peace and civility particularly after the end of WWII; this recent European war has unveiled the same narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy and fanaticism that Europe has accused the Middle East of, and the same destruction and ugliness is witnessed.
All the aforementioned contemporary wars are but living examples of the horrific realities and atrocities of war in all its aspects. They are reminders of the brutality and inhumanity of people involved in those wars from the onset of the 20th century up to our contemporary times. However, as literature is often times a vehicle in which some of the realities of life are represented, those terrifying realities of wars found a way to be vented out and voiced in literature whether in the forms of novels, poetry or drama to reveal both the intensity and futility of wars waged worldwide. Soldiers participating directly and indirectly in wars wrote extensively about their experiences trying to bring it to light to those who do not know the realities of the battlefield. The trend started during WWI and WWII when participating soldiers in both wars started writing poems that talked about their experience in the war. Among the most famous war writers and poets of the 20th century were Seigfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemmingway and later Ted Hughes who revealed many terrifying truths of trench warfare during WWI.
Contemporary war poetry, states Sara Martin Alegre (2003), is as varied as post-war novels and post-war dramas and the history of post-war poetry is initially the history of the poet’s constant fluctuations towards and away from T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden (p. 28). Poets like Wendy Cope, Roy Fuller, Thom Gunn, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes are prominent figures of contemporary war poetry and its various movements and schools. Alegre (2003) interestingly recounts a brief history of those movements starting with Romantic and other singular poets headed by Dylan Thomas who became the main poet living in Britain after Auden’s exile (p. 29). Dylan Thomas’s new romanticism exerted an immediate influence on the poets of the 1940s and the movement was called New Romanticism. Many poets preferred to follow the example of Thomas’ style mainly because it was characterized by a highly sensitive, personal and subjective poetry (unlike Auden’s more rational approach) in their search of a poetical language capable of expressing the anxieties endured by the individual trapped by the horrors of contemporary history (p. 29). The Movement was another group of poets emerging in the 1950s who were products of the expansion of education brought by the labor government: often of lower middle-class origin who had been helped by scholarships to enter Oxford or Cambridge, and were later employed as lecturers of English in the new universities (p. 29). The poetry of The Movement mocked the excesses of New Romanticism and was characterized by its urbanity, civility and decorum, and by a restrained use of emotion. It was a poetry aimed at maintaining with the reader a level-toned and civilized conversation, often of a fairly literary kind (p.30). Apart from The Movement, explicates Alegre (2003), the 1950s saw a birth of The Group which had no common pattern, no manifesto, but acted as an open forum where poets could read each other’s work, and thus foreshadowed the now popular writing workshops (p.30). Later, other groups of poets called the Underground Poets started their careers in the 1950s and showed a much greater enthusiasm towards American poetry. For them, American poetry seemed more in touch with the rough rhythms of contemporary life than the urbane poetry of The Movement (p.31). This interest in incorporating foreign poetical influences into English poetry was also shared by Ted Hughes and Goeffrey Hill. Despite their very different styles, both sensed the historical realities of post-war Europe demanded a more vigorous poetry than anything The Movement could offer (p.31). Therefore, Hughes has become one of the main poetical voices in English literature thanks to his celebration of the dark rhythms of nature and his valuation of the animal world above the rational, destructive impulses of human civilization (p.31).
1.2 Research Questions
As offered above with the brief account of poetry emerging on the 20th century scene after both World Wars, this paper will try to investigate some of Hughes’s famous war poems taken from his much-acclaimed books, Wodwoo and The Hawk in the Rain as examples of the most compelling poetries of the modern age and will try to answer two questions. The first is that Hughes’s selected war poems serve as a catharsis or redress when portraying the effects of war on both the guilty survivor and their traumatized descendants. Another question worth investigating is the blunt exposition of the devastation, destruction and atrocities of war depicted in Hughes’ poems as loathsome and vile as they are.
2.0 Literature Review
Ted Hughes, an English poet who was born in 1930 and died in 1998, was also Poet Laureate for about a decade, a short story writer and a dramatist. He is already regarded as a major poet of the twentieth century and is being read as a writer with huge significance for the future of the human species in the twenty-first century (Gifford, 2009, p. 223). From the beginning, Hughes possessed an amazingly coherent sense of the field he wanted to explore and articulate, first through poetry, and then through stories and plays (p.231). He also knew that he wanted to break with the conventional wisdom, preoccupations and the modes of poetry that dominated England, so he felt that the Movement poets were avoiding the most urgent questions facing human beings in a post-industrial society (p.231). As a result, his work was a radical attempt to challenge the taken-for-granted issues by addressing those urgent questions like: what connected human nature, the inner lives of people, with the great forces of nature around them? How could people negotiate a relationship with the apparently battling life and death processes of the earth in which they had their home? (p.241). Of course, Hughes himself believed that the poet had a public duty to explore the most troubling questions of his time and produce work that would have a healing function if the poet has faced up to the most dangerous risks, and kept his moral and linguistic focus (p. 249). This research goes along the same lines as the above-mentioned point and also tries to focus on the ability of the poet to create poems that would serve as a healing function to the poet himself. The poem, thus, becomes the remedy to cure extreme emotional distress.
In Britain, Hughes was recognized as a major post-war poet, who despite his unusual and often challenging books, was adopted by the establishment at all levels. Hughes was also awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal in 1974 and the OBE in 1977 (p.667).
In his Birthday Letters Hughes defined poetry as:
nothing more than a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction – whether our own or that of others whose feelings we can share. The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. (as cited. in Gifford, 2009, p. 3841)
Again, Hughes gives a clear idea of the way he regards poetry as a healing power to a pain the poet himself feels or with a pain shared by others around him. In this light, Hughes’s war poetry should be seen in exactly the same way; a means to heal the pain that the poet feels from the direct exposure of the realities of war, and/or from the imagined and shared experience of war from others.
Tim Kendall (2005) states in his excellent article “Fighting Back Over the Same Ground” that primitivism, shamanism, trickster myth, pastoral, post-pastoral, ecology, para-psychology –it sometimes seems there is no context so esoteric that it has not been used to explain Hughes’s work (p.88). However, Hughes’s reputation as a war poet ranges widely from critics who do not acknowledge his war poetry and consider it in passing, to others who find Hughes’s war poetry as a direct reflection of the realities and horrors of war.
As a result, Hughes’s position as a war poet, according to Kendall (2005), “requires some defending because, not withstanding his own prompts and observation, the bulk of critical writing on Hughes remains silent about war” (p. 88). Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, for instance, indicate that Hughes’s war poems are not really war poems at all, and even Wilfred Owen, to whom Hughes professes a fundamental indebtedness, rates barely a mention in most critical studies. Therefore, whatever insights the various approaches to Hughes have afforded, states Kendall, their blindness to his belief that experience cannot be disentangled from the influence of war guarantees that they miss the forming impulse of his poetry (p.88). Kendall (2005) explains that Hughes recognized that impulse to be originated in a war fought on the home front as well as internationally (p.88). In this light, Hughes’s war poems should be considered as revealing as any other war poetry of his time and should be given more examination as this paper aims to accomplish.
Susan Bassnett (2009) states that Hughes was born in 1930, eleven years after the end of world war and nine years before the start of the next. He came to the world in an England troubled by poverty and political divisiveness, into a community in rural Yorkshire where the memories of the suffering endured by men in the trenches were very much alive, and his early poetry is full of references to stories that he must have heard recounted in his childhood. Bassnett also explains that Hughes’s generation was touched by war through relationships with the survivors and the bereaved (p.1-2). This is quite true since Hughes’s war poetry bring to life the horrific images of war trenches and the intensity of sufferings that a soldier might have felt. Hughes’s “father’s combat experience,” states Meyers (2009), “and the work of war poets like Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sasoon inspired an imaginative as well as realistic approach, and he packed his poems with literary as well as historical allusions (p.31). In fact, Hughes is considered in contemporary norms one of the greatest writers who had succeeded in visualizing not only the destruction and horrors of war, but also the psychological impact as well as the trauma felt by soldiers who had engaged in war
Thus, this paper explores how Hughes’ war poetry articulates the complex emotions tied to war and its aftermath, cementing his place as a pivotal figure in modern war poetry.
3.0 Discussion
3.1 Hughes War poetry as a catharsis or redress for both the guilty survivor and their traumatized descendants
The term ‘war poetry’ has become so familiar that its internal tensions go unnoticed, explains Kendall in The Oxford Handbook of British and War Poetry (as cited in Stringer,1993, p. 1). He further states that it’s hard to imagine two human activities more unlike each other than experiencing a war and writing a poem, because, the first suggests destruction, the other creation; one chaos, the other order; one pain and the other pleasure. War poetry, argues Kendall (2005), accommodates binary oppositions, most notably life and death. A war poem must be at war with itself since it illuminates a dark subject matter (p.1) and actually “beautifies the terrible” (p.4). Indeed, Kendall’s argument seems to pinpoint the fact that war poetry signifies the horrors and brutalities of war while neglecting the internal struggles that the poet feels when composing the aesthetic out of the gruesome. This juxtaposition makes the poet experience a sense of guilt combined with a need of a redress of some kind in order to voice those struggles. Ted Hughes’s war poems do exactly that; serving as a catharsis for the guilty feelings of the surviving soldiers of war (his father and uncle) and himself for daring to “beautify the terrible” experiences they have witnessed in the form of poetry.
“When I started writing, I wrote again and again about the First World War” Ted Hughes acknowledged one day (as qtd. in Kendall, 2005, p.87). Hughes further explains that his father’s stories made that very near to him, and living in West Yorkshire, where everybody seemed to have lost everybody that went to war, was a very impressive experience to grow up in (Hadley, 2009, p. 40). Although Hughes had never gone to war as a soldier, yet he is still considered one of the best war poets that succeeded in reflecting all the sorrow and tragedy that accompanied the life of a soldier after returning from battle and the psychological effects on the soldier’s life and that of his immediate family.
Jeffrey Meyers (2013) asserts the aforementioned fact in his excellent article “Ted Hughes: War Poet” in which he explains that Ted Hughes was born in 1930, and grew up in a household overshadowed by the experiences of his father and uncle in World War I. His father, William, escaped the slaughter in Gallipoli in May 1915, and thus was one of only seventeen survivors of an entire battalion of a thousand men massacred by Turkish artillery (p. 30). As a result, Hughes’s father told war stories that “were so vivid, his psychological wound so palpable that Hughes felt that he himself had witnessed the apocalyptic carnage” (p. 30). Indeed, most of Hughes’s war poems reflect the trauma that his father had felt and this “survivor’s guilt passed on to Hughes as a child [and] continued to torment his life and influence his art” (p. 30). The majority of Hughes’s war poetry resound this guilty feeling and internal struggle of the surviving soldier who had witnessed the brutal realities of war. However, whatever destructive feelings resulted from the aftermath of the war his father or even his Uncle Walt (who was also a soldier who fought in WWI) had engaged in, they were successfully twisted by Hughes into poems that would mirror the horrific and the cruelties of war, and would serve as a form of catharsis or redress to the guilt-stricken survivor. Hughes’ war poems entitled “Out” and “The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers” are both about his father’s wound and portray soldiers surviving their physical wound but not their psychological trauma (p. 36). This reality is as crippling as any other physical wound, and could prove to be even more destructive if it were not properly vented out from the tormented memory of the soldier. As a matter of fact, Hughes tried his best to make both his father and his uncle Walt tell everything they had experienced during the war as a way to relieve them from their tormented souls yet failed most of the time. In “My Uncle’s Wound”, for instance, the poet tries to make contact with his old Uncle Walt through his stories (Bassnett, 2009, p. 1) and both he and his uncle go back forty years later to the place in Normandy where his uncle was wounded in the Great War (Meyers, 2013, p. 36). The dazed and weary uncle is tormented once again by horrific memories: “the black stench of dead men,” “the crazed eyes of men / Once blown to pieces then reassembled” (p.36). The uncle also recalls how a sniper’s “bullet picked him up by the hip bone / And laid him in a shell-hole,” where he remained, showered by bullets for the rest of the day (p. 36). Clearly, the memories come haunting the uncle with a vengeance and reopen the wounds in the same vicious intensity of the past. Hughes sympathizes with him and tries to make him articulate those memories, but unfortunately, his attempts in freeing his uncle from his fatal memories prove unsuccessful. “I scavenged for a memory,” writes Hughes, “[for] crumbs of rust or of bone”, but his uncle has lost touch and “He became quiet/ With his memories” (as qtd. in Bassnett, 2009, p. 2) and plunged again into the terrifying past leaving the poet feeling sorry for him. In this sense, Hughes’s poem “My Uncle’s Wound” is meant to be a redress and catharsis of his uncle’s culpable survival after the dreadful experiences he had faced in war. In the poem, Hughes has done what his uncle couldn’t: uttering the suppressed memories that depict the vicious realities of war, thus, cleansing the poet’s own feelings of guilt as well as his uncle’s.
Similarly, in “Out” and “The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers” Hughes also highlights the intensity of the guilt his father feels after the war and how his behavior affects his family specifically Hughes. Meyer (2013) explains that the title “Out” may refer to a soldier coming out of his grave. It opens in 1934, sixteen years after the end of the war, when the four-year old Hughes observes the effects of a shell shock (p.37) on his father:
My father sat in his chair recovering
From the four-year mastication by gunfire and mud,
Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking
In the colors of mutilation. (p. 37)
Here Hughes draws a very moving picture of his father’s detachment from the real world and his engrossment in the horrors of the past. He sits on a chair remembering his four- year involvement in a cruel war while flashbacks of the dead mutilated bodies haunt him beyond imagination. He seems so guilty that he has outlived the horror, and this drags him back into the trenches among his dead comrades. In this sense, Meyer (2013) explicates that:
[Hughes’s] father, suffering survivor’s guilt, remembers (can never forget) the cruel detritus of war “jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shellcases and craters,” the “tree stumps” suggesting the leg-stumps left in the “blown-off boots”. He feels he belongs not with the living, but with his long-lost comrades, the “four-year strata of dead Englishmen.” (p.37)
Again, the recurrent “guilty” feeling of the survivor stiffens the air as Hughes, “small and four/ Lay on the carpet as his luckless double” states Kendall (as qtd in Stringer, 1996, p. 527). The four-year- old (Hughs) lies down under his father’s feet “with the spent and useless debris of war, sprawled out ‘Among jawbones and blown-off boots” states Pearsall (2009), and the father’s immobility “is contagious and inescapable” (p. 528). This highlights the fact that the horrid experiences that his father had witnessed are not exclusive to him but reach all those in direct contact with him because his face mirrors those horrible atrocities. Hughes waits for him to speak out, but his father keeps buried in those bitter memories of his. Unlike his father, Hughes “sought relief and consolation, as his father could not, in his furious art, propelled by emotion recollected in emotion” explains Meyers (2013, p. 39). As such, writing this poem was a means to vent out both his father’s and his own guilt towards surviving a brutal and incomprehensible war, and his poem acts as a catharsis to free both the poet and his father; the poet succeeds in voicing out the “terrible” and by that articulation, he is able to get rid of his guilt via his art.
3.2 Hughes’s war poems as a blunt exposure to the devastation, destruction and atrocities of war.
The majority of war poetry depicts the destruction and devastation war causes, but the intriguing aspect about Hughes’s war poems lies in the way he glorifies the violence of the “predator” and not the sufferings of the “prey”. Death was a dominant theme in Hughes’s most bloody and horrific poetry, states Meyers (2013), and his first connection with animals came from killing them. His doomed soldiers, thus, have the feral primitivism of the hunting and hunted beasts (p. 30). In this sense, the soldiers in the battlefield become animals in the jungle, who are both the predators and the prey in the way they tear each other apart mercilessly. “At war with themselves and with men”, explains Meyers (2013), “these animals have, like predators tearing out the entrails of their prey, a primeval instinct to kill” (p. 30). Hughes characteristic hawk in the famous The Hawk in the Rain surveys the world between “hooked head and hooked feet”:
I kill where I please because it is all mine ….
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living. (cited in Meyers, 2013, pp. 30-31)
The hawk in the poem represents the stronger soldier who feels he has the absolute power to kill without mercy; tearing out heads viciously, and sharing them as a war loot with death. The hawk seems to be sneering at the weak prey, and showing off his strength in contrast to the victim’s helplessness. Meyers (2009) further clarifies that Hughes’s poetry combined the instinct to kill of fierce birds and animals with the killing of men in war and then contrasted the natural world of gentler animals with the murder of men in battle (p. 31). Again, most Hughes’s war poems emphasize how “his fascination with predators is flavored by the cordite oozings of war” (Kendall, 2005, p. 92), a fact that again signifies the ugly and animalistic nature of war. In “Bomber Pilot”, for instance, Hughes celebrates the pilot’s absolute power that he possesses due to his unreachable status high above:
I can boast
The enemy capital will jump to a fume
At a turn of my wrist
And the huge earth be shaken in its frame. (as cited in Meyers, 2009, p. 34)
Here again, Hughes portrays a boastful pilot who knows the extant of destruction his bombs will create on the towns of the enemy. In wars, just like in the forest, only the fittest survive. While most war poems highlight the sufferings of the defeated, Hughes “aims to depict a violence that shocks society with this truth about itself and its actions” (Kendall, 2009, p. 95). As a result, most Hughes’s poems describe in minute details the aftermath of a battlefield scene with the bodies of the deceased scattered into pieces. For instance, in “Out”, Hughes describes the “jawbones and blown-off boots” of the dead soldiers as they lie in the field. In “Bayonet Charge”, explicates Meyers (2009), Hughes portrays an infantry attack, and captures the excitement, confusion and terror of battle as a soldier, literally, running for his life and to almost certain death, plunges towards the pathetic protection of a green hedge:
King, honour, human dignity, etcetera
Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm
To get out that blue crackling air
His terror’s touchy dynamite. (p. 32)
In the above quote, Hughes mocks the conceptual ideals of “King”, “honor” and “human dignity,” that a soldier is brainwashed with before enlisting in a war, contrasting them to the true ugly face of war. All those terms a soldier is bombarded with before war prove futile and worthless when the soldier makes a run for his life or when he witnesses the body of his comrade shattering into pieces. The explosions happening are both from within and without; he is surrounded with explosions and he risks the danger of the terror swarming inside him from exploding like “dynamite”. In this scene, states Meyers (2013), Hughes seems to be echoing Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) in which he also rejects the patriotic lies during a war and insists that only the actual places that men had fought and died had any dignity and meaning: “I had seen nothing sacred [in war],” states Hemmingway, “and the things that were glorious had no glory . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene” (as qtd. in Meyers, 2013, p. 32) beside the concrete realities of war. Hughes, thus, was dedicated to the exposure of truth in his war poems and wanted to convey that “mouthing jingoistic lies” (Meyers, 2013, p. 32) do not justify all the pathos and terror of the horrific fighting. So, “In Griefs for Dead Soldiers”, Hughes sets the pathos and terror of the fighting against the blind patriotism that is meant to justify it all (p. 32).
To sum up, Ted Hughes is considered one of great pioneers of war poets whose poetry now “resonate more forcefully than ever as we try to help the current wave of shell-shocked victims of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan” (Meyers, 2013, p. 39). His war poetry also show war as brutal as it is without concealing its ugly reality as a means to expose its brutality and the fakeness from all its “supposed” glory.
4.0 Conclusion
The emergence of war poetry at the turn of the 20th century reflects a significant shift in literary expression, driven by the need to articulate the profound and often horrific experiences of global conflicts. Ted Hughes’ contributions to this genre, particularly through his collections Wodwo and The Hawk in the Rain, exemplify the power of poetry to confront and convey the raw realities of war. His poems serve as a form of catharsis for both the guilty survivors and their traumatized descendants, providing a necessary outlet for the intense emotions associated with wartime experiences.
Hughes’ unflinching portrayal of the devastation and atrocities of war offers readers a blunt and honest exposition of its impact, resonating deeply with the brutality of contemporary conflicts. By delving into the psychological and emotional aftermath of war, Hughes’ poetry not only documents historical events but also explores the enduring human cost of violence and conflict. His work stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of war poetry, highlighting its role in helping society to understand, process, and ultimately find some measure of redress for the traumas of war.
Through vivid imagery and poignant narratives, Hughes has cemented his place as a pivotal figure in modern war poetry, demonstrating the genre’s ability to capture the complexities of human experience in the face of unimaginable adversity. As we continue to grapple with the consequences of contemporary conflicts, Hughes’ war poems remain a powerful reminder of the enduring impact of war on the human soul.
4.1 Further Studies
His war poetry could be further studied in terms of psychoanalysis as comparing his war poetry with the life he had led. This could be significant especially since Ted Hughes’s personal life was a marked by a series of grim dilemmas with the suicide of his first wife Sylvia Plath, the famous American poet, the suicide of his second wife Assia Gumann, and the war trauma that Hughes had witnessed of both his father and his uncle. All the aforementioned troubles had definitely left an intense impact that should be traced in his war poems and further examined.
Works Cited
Alegre, S. M. (2003). Post-war English literature 1945-1990. University Oberta de Catalunya. Retrieved from http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Post-War%201945-1990.pdf
Bassnett, S. (2009). Writers and their work: Ted Hughes. Tavistock, GBR: Writers and their Work. ProQuest ebrary. Retrieved November 10, 2015, from http://site.ebrary.com/
Gifford, T. (2009). Ted Hughes. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hadley, E. (2009). The elegies of Ted Hughes (Durham theses). Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2903/
Pearsall, C. D. (2009). The war remains of Keith Douglas and Ted Hughes. In The Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry. Oxford University Press.
Kendall, T. (2005). Fighting back over the same ground. The Yale Review, 93(1), 87-102.
Kendall, T. (2007). The Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Meyers, J. (2013). Ted Hughes: War poet. The Antioch Review, 71(1), 30-39, 196-197. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1274705825?accountid=8555
Roberts, N. (2007). Ted Hughes ‘New Selected Poems’. Literature Insights. Humanities-Ebooks.
Stringer, J. (1996). The Oxford companion to twentieth-century literature in English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Retrieved November 10, 2015, from http://search.ebscohost.com/
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