Ted Hughes’s Animals Reconsidered

Abstract

This paper examines the implication of animals’s resistance and the appearance of the mysterious presence in Hughes’s poems from an ecological perspective. “The Thought-Fox” and “The Bull Moses” show the resistance of animals and the unbridgeable gap between humans and animals, and another poem “An Otter” demonstrates more vividly the struggle of the resisting animals to survive in the anthropocentric world. However, recognition of their struggles also opens up the possibility of Deleuzian idea of “becoming-animal.” “The Jaguar” and “Hawk Roosting” demonstrate that poet’s consciousness and animal’s consciousness are intermingled for a poet to gain access to the animal’s subjectivity, with a minimized human’s intervention. Hughes’s metier in the process of becoming-animal here is to show us how to embody animals. By inhabiting the body of the jaguar and the otter, the poems themselves become the record of Hughes’s engagement with animals. “Wodwo” more vividly dramatizes the process of becoming-animal. Hughes’s poems remind us of how deeply humans are connected to nature and how small we are. His poems are the attempt itself to capture animals and consequently the poems become a new species of creature, and reveal the not yet and unrealized becoming of humans and animals which becomes a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by humans.