understanding of animals in captivity, nuclear technology, food production and conservation. In the States, his interest in the environment began in earnest. After he graduated, he took up several odd jobs that enabled him to observe animals and plants at close quarters. One of the most important of these, for his poetry, was his experience washing dishes in Regent’s Park Zoo. Poems begun during the early 1950s show that he was considering the repression of human beings’ instincts and examining the experiences of caged animals. New technologies were broadcasting information about wild animals’ lives, and perpetuating early
conservationist views. Hughes would later comment that ‘[s]ince the late fifties […] books and more recently television programmes about wildlife and natural history have become virtually a craze’, and he credited them with changing people’s attitude towards animals and the environment (WP 267). 1955, the BBC series Look, presented by naturalist Sir Peter Scott, launched with an episode about foxes. ‘The Thought-Fox’, that seminal evocation of poetic inspiration, was partly inspired by a Swedish nature film about foxes.
Hughes and Plath’s passionate meeting in 1956, and their ensuing poetic partnership, were foundational for their lives and critical to their writing – but Plath also began to shape Hughes’s attitudes towards the environment. He was exposed to her compassionate view of animals; fostered by her suburban upbringing, her ideas about them were somewhat different from the unsentimental opinions of Yorkshire’s farmers and poachers. Her reaction to his killing of a sick grouse in Yorkshire in August 1956 permanently affected his attitude towards shooting. Hughes had been concerned about nuclear technology since he was a student; but Plath’s well-developed knowledge of nuclear testing in America would have sharpened his concern. Russia and America were circling each other (CPH 62), and the Suez Crisis of 1956 saw the Soviets threatening to unleash their nuclear firepower on Western Europe. Awareness of the impact of pollution in Britain was growing: also in 1956, Britain passed the Clean Air Act. This reduced London’s terrible smogs; it also improved air quality in the industrial north, where the buildings of Hughes’s childhood had been grimed by coal fire smoke and the burning of coalpit waste.
It was not until Hughes and Plath moved to America in 1957 that Hughes would begin writing about nuclear technology and the Cold War, and to gain a fuller understanding of the environmental implications of food production. Frustrated by the sterility of suburban life, he was developing his critique of the western mind exiled from nature. Yet he also experienced the magnificent national parks that would feature in Birthday Letters, and met the Native Americans he had long dreamed of encountering. He read that nuclear waste was being dumped off the coasts of Boston and Ireland. Upon his return to Britain, his reading of Silent
Spring further sharpened his awareness. His interest in environmental issues began in earnest
when he lived in the States, but it would not be until the mid 1960s that the term
‘environmentalist’ would come into use. By the early 1960s, he would have seen himself as an opponent of nuclear technology, an activist, and a conservationist. With the foundation of World Wide Fund for Nature in 1961, international awareness of conservation was also developing rapidly. Max Nicholson, an environmental thinker who would play a part in
catalysing Hughes’s explicitly environmentalist writing, chaired the committee that set up the Fund.
It was during this chapter in the development of his environmentalism that Hughes wrote what was probably his first environmental protest-poem. Hughes, Plath and their daughter attended an Aldermaston march in 1960, and their opposition to nuclear weapons would pave the way for Hughes’s explicitly environmentalist activities from 1970 onwards. His first three poetry collections display the expansion of his poetic ambitions and the development of his thinking about animals; there is a progression from focusing on human cruelty inflicted upon animals (‘Macaw and Little Miss’; ‘The Jaguar’) towards poems of symbiosis (‘The Thought- Fox’, ‘February’, ‘The Bear’), through to poems about putting animals to justifiable use (‘View of a Pig’, ‘Lupercal’). ‘Wodwo’, written in 1961 but collected in 1966, is a masterful rendition of a speaker’s attempt at integration with the nonhuman; it paves the way for formally and sonically adventurous elegies that use animal symbols (‘The Howling of Wolves’, ‘Skylarks’). In Lupercal, Hughes’s poetry becomes noticeably more engaged with environmental issues, with the result that by the time he publishes Wodwo, he has begun to create poems of intricate ecological interconnection.
‘A Widening, Deepening Greenness’
After Cambridge, Hughes appears to have wanted to combine writing with work that would allow him to encounter animals. This contributed to his Heathcliff-like persona, but it was also symptomatic of his longing to connect to the ‘wild, natural world’ beyond lecture theatres and offices. An early idea for a money-making scheme had been mink farming – ‘an extension of my trapping over Old Denaby’, he told his brother (LTH 26). He washed dishes at Regent’s Park Zoo in the autumn of 1954, and got to know a particular jaguar that lived in a small cage near the kitchen window (LTH 586). His job as a rose-gardener in the summer of 1955 (Bate 2015 87) was somewhat tamer, but it nevertheless enabled him to work outdoors and to learn about cultivation. Crucially, his time at Regent’s Park Zoo let him observe wild animals in captivity: this was one of the experiences that inspired his famous poem ‘The Jaguar’ and his descriptions of the inert creatures surrounding it. Hughes had begun to write about the pent-up energies of caged beasts and the caging of human beings’ baser instincts; but it is contradictory that he would consider caging mink for profit. He would express
conflicting views about the treatment of captive, farmed and hunted animals for the rest of his life.
Edwin Muir found that Hughes’s ‘The Jaguar’ had an ‘admirable violence’. There is no doubt that some of Hughes’s strongest poems deal with violence: the sequence of war-poems that ends The Hawk in the Rain, the smouldering energy of Lupercal’s ‘Hawk Roosting’ and the rapacious predation in ‘Thrushes’ show Hughes wielding violence to great poetic effect. Yet his early poems about animals have too often been reduced to their violent and
anthropocentric elements. When Hughes writes of the ‘legendary depth’ of the pond in ‘Pike’, he hints at the depth and multiplicity of poetic meanings in his early animal-poems. In his interview with Faas, he evokes his animal poems’ rich capacity for polysemy: ‘The
symbol opens all these things … it is the reader’s own nature that selects’. When commenting on his poem ‘The Jaguar’, he offered a range of interpretations:
I prefer to think of [poems such as ‘The Jaguar’] as first, descriptions of a jaguar, second … invocations of the Goddess, third … invocations of a jaguar-like body of elemental force, demonic force. […] A jaguar after all can be received in several different aspects … he is a beautiful, powerful nature spirit, he is a homicidal maniac, he is a supercharged piece of cosmic machinery, he is a symbol of man’s baser nature shoved down into the id and growing cannibal murderous with deprivation, he is an ancient symbol of Dionysus since he is a leopard raised to the ninth power, he is a precise historical symbol to the bloody-minded Aztecs’ (Faas 199).
Among the ‘several different aspects’ of his jaguar that Hughes allows his reader to perceive, are the violent ‘homicidal maniac’, the potentially violent, human repressed ‘baser nature’, its significance in mythology – and also its far more positive role as a ‘beautiful, powerful nature spirit’. His comments invite an ecocritical reading that is particularly rich and multilayered. Sagar finds that Hughes’s early animals are ‘machines’, and that Wodwo marks an abrupt change towards biocentrism (2009 90). Yet as we have seen, his part-mechanical, part- organic animals deconstruct the idea of a binary relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. His evocation of humankind’s ‘baser nature’ suggests a link between human beings’ animal instincts and our creaturely cousins; the structure of The Hawk in the Rain, which begins with a sequence of poems about the forces of nature and ends with a series of war-poems, invites a comparison of the two. Indeed, Lidström finds anti-anthropocentric strains in supposedly ‘violent’ poetry, which depicts ‘acts of violence that are, in Hughes’s poetics, wholly natural and amoral’. This was a view that Hughes had first encountered in Haig-Brown’s work. One of Hughes’s letters about Lupercal complicates Lidström’s view of Hughes’s animal violence as amoral; yet the poems that channel the energy of animals’ positive violence are indeed ‘expressions of a more-than-human nature’, as Lidström puts it (2015 144). The vivid, realistic, violent lives of Hughes’s animals invite us to consider the beastlier sides of human nature, and accord tremendous agency to the animals themselves. It is this creaturely agency, this sense of our intrinsic connection to animals, that need to be explored in greater depth. Hughes’s first poetry collection The Hawk in the Rain (1957) begins with a menagerie of animal-poems. ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Macaw and Little Miss’, ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Horses’ signal their creaturely subject matter in their titles, while ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Secretary’ and ‘A Modest Proposal’ examine the creaturely aspects of human beings. At least three – ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Macaw and Little Miss’, and ‘Famous Poet’ – draw on images of captive beasts that Hughes derived from his time working at London Zoo. Poems such as ‘Wind’ and ‘Song’ explore the connections between human beings and the wider environment. The collection’s middle section transitions from this evocation of the Muse to several poems evoking difficult heterosexual relationships (‘A Modest Proposal,’
‘Incompatibilities’) and achieves moments of resolution (‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’).78 A
particular asset to the collection is the series of powerful war-poems with which it ends, running from ‘Casualty’ to ‘Two Wise Generals’. Most importantly for this analysis of his ecopoetry, Hughes devotes a great deal of space to creatures, weather and landscape. Hughes had written or begun some of the key poems in this collection, such as ‘The Jaguar’, ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Song’, (PC 291-92) before he met Plath. Others were written after he had witnessed her reaction to his killing of the grouse in Yorkshire. He would not speak publicly about this incident until much later in his life. However, he had been exposed to two conflicting attitudes towards animals by the time his first collection was published. The hunting, poaching and trapping traditions of his Yorkshire childhood came into tension
with Plath’s sensitive impulse to spare pursued creatures (except fish – LTH 131). Hughes’s early communion with animals, and his continuing affinity with them, shapes some striking poems of animal agency. The most ecological of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain, ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’, show animal eyes expressing the wild force of will and creating a moment of creaturely communion. This is an important goal of ecopoetry: it ‘explores the human capacity for becoming animal, as well as humanity’s ethically
challenged relation to other animals’ (Skinner 2011). Derrida thought that to break down the barrier between human and animal, we must ‘seen seen’ by an animal whose eyes meet ours. Animal eyes can, without a word, ‘address’ us (2002 382; original italics). Hughes goes a step further: looking into an animal eye initiates a ‘widening, deepening greenness’ that creates a symbiotic poetic partnership with an inspiring animal.
The hawk of the collection’s title poem is evoked vividly and with striking poetic force, and the poem intermittently turns the reader’s focus towards its human speaker. There are some images that lock the poem’s focus into a human viewpoint: the hawk is ‘Steady as a
hallucination’. The frustrated speaker yearns towards the ‘master- | Fulcrum of violence’ where the hawk hangs still. A discourse of mastery and omnipotence permeates this poem, although it is noteworthy that Hughes has inherited some of this discourse from Dylan Thomas’s hawks, and that the poem ends with the hawk’s vulnerability: he may fall and ‘mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land’. The hawk can certainly be read as a richly
symbolic thought-animal, a metaphor for the wings on which the powerful dare aspire. Yet the poem’s visionary qualities are balanced by its realism, which is generated by its
rootedness in a particular time and locality. The ‘drumming ploughland’ might be Old
Denaby farm; the ‘banging wind’ that ‘kills these stubborn hedges’ (CPH 19) evokes the wild Northern English weather that becomes the ‘brunt wind’ and drumming hills of ‘Wind’ (36),
which was written mostly at Hughes’s parents’ house in Heptonstall.79 The hovering hawk is
a specific individual, hunting over Hughes’s own South Yorkshire hunting ground. The poem rejects the abstraction of Hopkins’s ‘dauphin’ with his ‘wimpling wing’, the improbability of Thomas’s ‘souls of slain birds sailing’. Here, two currents of thought that inform Hughes’s environmentalism combine: the poem brings together his boyhood fascination with hawks and owls, and his growing acknowledgement of animals’ perceptions, survival instinct, individuality and vulnerability.
Raptors fascinated Hughes from his childhood, and large predators haunt his adult poetry. He began to think about the cruelty that human beings inflict upon predators when he saw the fox in the deadfall (Dream Time); he would have further considered the treatment of predators when he worked in Regent’s Park Zoo. Hughes evokes his dismay at seeing wild animals in confinement: parrots strut ‘Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut’, the captive lion and tiger are ‘Fatigue with indolence’, the boa constrictor is a coiled ‘fossil’ (CPH 19). These are the broken-spirited animals that one encountered in zoos of the mid-twentieth century, before the animal rights movement and the Zoo Licensing Act of 1981 placed greater emphasis on their welfare. They also function as symbols of human beings’ repressed ‘baser nature’, longing to be unchained. Indeed, the early version of the poem that Hughes
published in Chequer described the crowds of onlookers as behind bars: ‘And like life-
prisoners they through bars stare out’ (1242). Hughes first saw a jaguar in a tiny cage in a zoo at Morecambe at the age of five. He tried to model it repeatedly, and remembered it for much of his adult life. This is the jaguar of the early version of his poem. At Regent’s Park Zoo, in 1954, Hughes met that ‘particular Jaguar’ who lived in a ‘transit’ cage near the kitchen (LTH 586). His mind linked this animal to the jaguar that he had seen at Morecambe. He set about ‘modelling’ the jaguar in verse, trying to capture ‘that irritated, black-lipped half-snarl’ that big cats exhibit ‘when they’re going to and fro in cages feeling pent-up’ (LTH 587).
Leonard Scigaj writes that ‘The jaguar’s activity reinforces the premium Hughes places upon vitality in his fifties journey toward Reality’ (1980 48), while Michael Malay finds it to be ‘symbolic’ and ‘visionary’ (93, 97). Readings of this animal as a visionary have persisted. Bate sees the jaguar as Hughes’s totem animal, and the poem that honours it as containing the central myth of Hughes’s work: ‘For Hughes, the role of the poet is to break the iron bars, to set free the spirit of the jaguar, to return humankind to its primal relationship with nature’ (2015 94). From Hughes’s own commentary on the poem, there is no doubt that he celebrates the jaguar as a nature-spirit replete with liberating, Dionysian energy. Yet his remarks call up more disturbing aspects of human beings’ baser nature. He offers a reading of his jaguar as a ‘homicidal maniac’. Some critics went a step further: ‘Where I conjured up a jaguar, they smelt a stormtrooper’ (Faas 201), and indeed Bentley has pointed out that the poem is a commentary on ‘fascism, class, and the idea of natural superiority’ (Bentley 52). Hughes takes pains to steer his conversation with Faas away from such troubling political affiliations, but his critics are right to catch a whiff of disturbing history amid the jaguar-stinks of this poem. In the essay ‘Poetry and Violence’, he invites readers to view his jaguar as a symbol of political trauma in the collective unconscious. Amid the dreams of his German patients, Jung reported, ‘between the wars, a rapidly increasing population of lions, panthers, big dangerous cats’ (WP 264). The short, fierce fuse of Hughes’s jaguar that ignites the bang of blood in the brain, the fire-blind eyes, bring with them after-images of the detonating bombs that fell on South Yorkshire during the Blitz, and of the nuclear blasts that preoccupied Hughes and Plath during the 1950s. Despite his later claim in ‘Poetry and Violence’ that his predators are ‘angels’ (262), Hughes’s animals do call up images of a human violence that is far more destructive than a predator’s kill. Lidström’s view that the violence of Hughes’s predators is natural and amoral (2015 144) is complicated by their link to human beings’ baser instincts – which may prompt human beings to act in a morally reprehensible way.
Yet the poem is not exclusively preoccupied with using animal symbols to stand in for human affairs. It also attempts to capture the jaguar’s perception of reality in a striking example of Hughes’s early ecocentrism. Within the last two lines of the third stanza, there is a shift from the crowd’s perspective to a closeup of the jaguar that focuses on its eyes: the jaguar is ‘hurrying enraged | Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes’ (CPH 19). These words encapsulate the jaguar’s rage at being imprisoned, and raise the ethical question of whether it is right to cage animals for human pleasure. Yet the ‘drills of his eyes’ evoke the jaguar’s penetrating gaze, the pent-up violence of his predatory instincts – and his agency. ‘His stride is wildernesses of freedom’ releases the jaguar from his prison into the untameable
world of his own subjectivity. The poem ends, ‘Over the cage floor the horizons come’ (CPH 20). There is a moment of identification between poet and animal here: the word ‘horizon’ was, after all, the one that Hughes had said could be found engraved around his own skull (The Rock 125). The idea that nonhumans have consciousness and subjectivity – what Hughes would call an ‘inner life’ – is a central preoccupation for ecocritics. Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ explored how we could envisage animal consciousness: bats have experience, although their perceptual apparatus is very different from our own, as they perceive their surroundings by using sonar (438) – which humans cannot use without the aid of technology. Even though bats’ apprehension of common mammalian experiences such as pain and fear have ‘a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive’ (439), it is likely that their perceptual experiences are ‘fully
comparable in richness of detail to our own’ (440).80 The jaguar is freighted with an intricate