This poem offers a great way into the world of Ted Hughes’s poetry. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is one of the most celebrated poetic accounts of the act of writing poetry and the attendant search for poetic inspiration. The poem had its origins in one of the most significant events of Hughes’s young life: while he was studying English at the University of Cambridge, Hughes found that studying poetry was having a deleterious effect on his own poetry: he was writing virtually no new poetry, because he felt suffocated by the ‘terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus’ of literary tradition. They dance on the surface among the flies. It simply starts, 'With a man it is otherwise.' Owls hushing the floating woods Hughes’ Archive recordings demonstrate his legendary qualities as a reader of his own work, his deep tones and flinty accent forming a perfect compliment to the hard music of his work. With the hair frozen on my head Kennedy, Rachael. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Hughes’ creative energies remained high, producing acclaimed collections including, just before his death, The Birthday Letters (1998), which revisited the fraught territory of his first marriage with searing honesty and tenderness. The opening line, 'Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,' is confusing and provokes the reader to read further, as the imagery of thrushes on the lawn is almost a pastoral scene, a common sight in many gardens and hardly 'terrifying.' ‘February 17th’ from Moortown Diary (1989) demonstrates a different method of composition, with Hughes recording his impressions of an event in a kind of spontaneous rough verse. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. However, it is this adjective that sets the tense and frightful tone of the first stanza. These recordings come from the archives of the BBC. Also important in moulding his sensibility was the strong dissenting tradition of this part of the world which would later feed into Hughes’ critique of the utilitarian rationalism of Western culture. Training is also mentioned as an option, as if these skills are developed through learning from one another throughout generations, and the possibility of having young mouths to feed is yet another option, with the offspring being described as 'brats,' a derogatory term. They dance on the surface among the flies. The triplet of paradoxes, 'swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;' emphasised by siblilance creates a sense of juxtaposing contrasts both being equally important in creating a balanced life. It presents the thrush as cold and calculated, and then compares its work to that of humans. Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old 'The mahogany table-top,' which is the first person speaker's 'mother's heirloom sideboard' supposes family connections, but the metaphor, 'mapped with the scars of my whole life,' suggests these connections and memories are not pleasant, but could also suggest that the violence and hurt now being experience as the 'table-top,' is 'smashed,'is creating the scars. Whose lilies and muscular tench Feel free to skip this section and go straight down to the selection of Hughes’ poems. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. Ted Hughes is consistently described as one of the twentieth century’s greatest English poets. Rather than giving us an idyllic or sentimental poem about the fragile or delicate beauty of the snowdrop, Hughes describes the flower in terms that recall the predatory weasel and crow, with the snowdrop’s ‘pale head heavy as metal’ (that last word so near, and yet so far, from ‘petal’) picking up on the weasel and crow which look as if they have been ‘moulded in brass’.

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