Volume V Special Issue IV October 2025

Name of Author : Dr. Syed Mujahid

Title of the paper : The Savage Grace of Nature: A Study of Animal Imagery and Symbolism in Ted Hughes Poetry

Abstract: Edward James Ted Hughes, 17 August 1930 to 28 October 1998 was an English poet and childrens writer. Critics routinely ranked him as one of the best poets of his generation. Ted Hughes was a British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Ted Hughes, a poet laureate is also called a Zoo laureate, an animal poet, a poet of blood and guts, a terrors ambassador, a Heath cliff, and an incredible hulk of British literature. The same poets poetry is termed a dismaying badness, a raw sex violence imagery. All this is in bitter condemnation which is evident from his uncompromising, obsessive preoccupation with beasts, birds, plants, insects, landscapes and other wild living beings in the natural world, which finds a permanent place in all his voluminous anthologies of poems. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Ted Hughess work is marked by a mythical framework, using the lyric and dramatic monologue to illustrate the intense subject matter. Animals appear frequently throughout his work as deity, metaphor, persona, and an icon. Perhaps the most famous of his subjects is Crow, an amalgam of god, bird and man, whose existence seems pivotal to the knowledge of good and evil. Ted Hughes symbols and images are spontaneously drawn from a wide variety of sources yet the subtlety of his sole purport of self analysis and self expiation through suffering unites them all. There is inevitability about his obsessive squaring up to the problem of modern mans self alienation from nature and the consequent spiritual torpor.

Keywords : Symbolism, Imagery, nature, animal world, landscape.

DOI :

Page Number : 171-174