Theme of Violence In Ted Hughes's Poetry: A Study of Selected Poems

Ted Hughes is a versatile genius.He is famous as a poet of violence. Violence is essentially one of his obsessive themes in his poetry. Hughes seems to equate violence with vehement activity, a destructive one.This study mainly takes up poems from his first two collections The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. It is an attempt to understand the interconnection between animal imagery and violence. In fact, the early poetry of Ted Hughes is the poetry of animal world. Violence is often implicated in his celebration of the instinctual energy symbolized by animals.We find that the poetry of Ted Hughes has an element of violence. For him violence and power go together: his own dark Gods are the marker of the tiger, not the lamb. Critics have generally referred to the presence of violence in the poetry of Ted Hughes. But no detailed study is available where the wide meanings of this aspect are sought to be understood.