Ted Hughes is widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry, but the impact of Hughes’s class background on his work has received little attention. This is the first full length study to take the measure of the importance of class in Hughes. It presents a radically new version of Hughes that challenges the image of Hughes as primarily a nature poet, as well as the image of the Tory Laureate. The controversy over ‘natural’ violence in Hughes’s early poems, Hughes’s relationship with Seamus Heaney, the Laureateship, and Hughes’s revisiting of his relationship with Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters (1998), are reconsidered in terms of Hughes’s class background. Drawing on the thinking of cultural theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, and Julia Kristeva, the book presents new political readings of familiar Hughes poems, alongside consideration of posthumously collected poems and letters, to reveal a surprising picture of a profoundly class-conscious poet.
- ISBN10 1474275575
- ISBN13 9781474275576
- Publish Date 25 February 2016 (first published 1 January 2014)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
- Format Paperback
- Pages 168
- Language English