Ted Hughes: Two Phases

Length / Form Two parts, 4 stanzas, 20 lines

Allusion to Classical figure Caractacus

Allusion to Classical place Rome

Relationship to Classical text Alludes to Caractacus 'in Rich Rome', 'defeated and displayed in Claudius' triumph'.

Comment The Hawk in the Rain was Hughes’s first book. It was published in the UK in 1957 after winning a poetry competition in America judged by (among others) W.H. Auden. Whilst more formal in typographic presentation than his later works, The Hawk in the Rain  proclaims Hughes’s poetic agenda, one of energy, vitality and death. Here poems about nature, poetry and war announce themselves in sharp contrast to the verse of contemporaries such as Philip Larkin. Hughes returns to this subject in ‘Phaethon’ in Tales from Ovid (CP, 880)