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Unit 5: The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

diminishes the imaginative power of some of Hughes’s early poetry is precisely the way in Notes
which an acute conflict which is central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or,
suppressed. In Crow, which I take to be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic achievement to
date, Hughes, almost for the first time, assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical
violence which is present in his poetry from the very beginning. In doing so he seems to take
full possession of his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had, until that point,
led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly cracked open in order to disgorge not
only its own violence but also all that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half
locked up within it.
The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which
is provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary
violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that ‘of a human body
in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed,
gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack’. But at the same time it is a play
about a man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to
weep those tears which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft,
weak and womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry. We have
only to recall Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of her own ‘soft’ maternal impulses in order to
appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing
cruelty of its terms:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I. vii)
The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of
course, in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and Shakespeare.
It is present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might reasonably be
regarded as a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some of the most
fundamental characteristics of the human identity.
Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to
take account both of what Mark Spilka has called ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’ and of
Ian Suttie’s discussion of the extent and rigour of the ‘taboo on tenderness’ in our own culture.[6]
But such an investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger cultural
context, and perhaps above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love has
itself traditionally been expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies.
The discussion of Hughes’s poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful
cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality – one which he himself has tended to project.
In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against
the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern history. He is rather like the hero in
one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May morning’, resolutely and stubbornly
wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of the river’s bed as the whole
course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the
opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental disintegration …
under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’, and

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