There is a satire by Vernon Scannell in which he considers a cow busy chewing the cud and wonders what is going on in its head. Can the creature be contemplating the composition of ‘a long poem about Ted Hughes’? The point of Scannell’s little joke is, of course, that for a while in the Sixties and Seventies, under the spell of Hughes’s early work, it was fashionable to write poems about animals which imagine those animals from, as it were, the inside. The most famous model was perhaps ‘Hawk Roosting’, from his Second volume Lupercal (1960):

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Lines not universally admired for their celebration of feathered fascism, but which Hughes himself still favours, judging from their inclusion in his New Selected Poems 1957-1994.) There was then, at all events, something of a School of Ted, which is to say that in those days the man had his imitators, fancy (if tough) anthropomorphists every one, all buy thinking themselves into the verbal re-creation of weasels, otters, snakes, naked mole rats, or any other bird or beast conveniently able to stand as a metaphor for human nastiness.

Hughes is not to be blamed for his disciples, any more than D H Lawrence or Dylan Thomas should be blamed for theirs. What is interesting, all the same, and abundantly clear from the first hundred pages or so of the present volume, is that Hughes, like Lawrence and Thomas, perfected early a manner of looking at the natural world which so impressed itself upon his contemporaries that some of them could wish nothing better for their own verse than that it should be indistinguishable from his. To my mind, he has never surpassed the finest of these early poems, that magical ‘The Thought-Fox’, which has pride of place as the first poem in his selection:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

 

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

 

Sets neat prints into the snow

Berween trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

 

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

The quality of observation of the fox in the third and fourth stanzas is good enough to deserve a better name than ‘description’, and so is the way the rhythm of the lines here and in the fifth stanza mimics the fox’s movement across the night snow. Thinking about this poem I remember that Hughes once confessed – in Poetry in the Making (Faber, 1967), a collection of radio talks for children that includes some interestingly unguarded, autobiographical matter – that he began writing verse in late adolescence, when it dawned upon him that his earlier passion for hunting animals ended in the possession of either a dead animal or, at best, a trapped one. He realised that he wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the foxness of the fox and the crowness of the crow. The writing of poems became for him then the making of verbal cages which might achieve this – or, rather, as in the not dissimilar case of D H Lawrence, the poem itself was intended to fit the quickness of the animal like another skin, a tegument of language. It is this activity, of course, which led some of his early critics to see Hughes as a nature poet, though it seems to me that he has really always been after bigger and more mysterious game than that label would imply. ‘The Thought-Fox’, for example, is as much about the act of writing a poem as it is about the animal that provided the poem with its inspiration. I remember hearing Hughes tell how he wrote those lines after a barren period in which he had given all his energies to literary criticism. He had fallen asleep, as I recall it, worn out and made miserable by academic studies, and dreamt a dream in which something archetypal came to him in the shape of a fox-man who pressed the hot, stinking palm of his hand upon the open page of the poet’s notebook, leaving a print as if to warn him not to neglect the natural forces.

Hughes is, of course, a Yorkshireman, born in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding in 1930, and his best work has always had something of a Pennine quality to it – dark, brooding, craggy, the vivid phrases moving through the poems like pike in a pool. ‘His images have an admirable violence,’ wrote gentle old Edwin Muir in a review which helped to establish the young poet’s reputation overnight, after his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, had appeared in 1957. (I reckon it a pity that this selection does not include the stirring title poem from that volume.) Since then the same violence has struck other critics as less admirable. Hughes has been attacked for gratuitous glorying in predatory matters. His sequence Crow (1971) caused perhaps the widest divergence of opinion. Hailed by some as a work of genius, it has been denigrated by others on account of what is perceived as a degree of formlessness, and an over-reliance on imagery of blood and guts. More seriously, Crow might be cited to show, as do the weaker elements of extravagance in the subsequent volumes Moortown (1979) and Wolfwatching (1989), the poet projecting his own agitation on the natural world in a way that reduces the life and death of creatures in that world to more or less Disney shapes. If Shelley was guilty of sentimentality in hailing the skylark as a ‘blithe spirit’, then there might appear a mere inversion of this attitude in Hughes addressing the same bird as a ‘whippet head’, a ‘bullet’, and a ‘motor’, with ‘long cutting screams buckling like razors’.

All the volumes mentioned above are more than adequately represented in the New Selected Poems, as is the appalling narrative poem Gaudete (1977), which started life as a film scenario, and which Hammer Films if they were still in the blood business would snap up immediately. The new book also contains a number of uncollected poems dating from each decade of Hughes’s writing life, as well as selections from his volumes of verse for children. Most pleasant of the uncollected poems seems to me ‘Reckless Head’, dating from round about 1980, until it chokes itself off with an obligatory reference to vomit in line 8. Since then, of course, Hughes has been made Poet Laureate – so far as I can make out, because Roy Fuller recommended him to the Queen as ‘certainly looking the part’.

Alongside his naturalistic ambitions, Hughes has always had something of the shaman and the showman in him. From wanting to capture in words the living presence of a creature, it is, for him, but one short, dangerous step to vatic pronouncements about the dark gods, occult fields of force connecting stream and star, and so forth. There is plenty of this at all periods in his work, and the interested reader will be able to ponder its representation here. Unfortunately, the same reader will be denied acquaintance with the choicer bits of Hughes’s performance as Laureate, such as that poem in Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems (1992) in which he declares that the colour of the Lion of England runs now in the Queen’s corgis, and that when the Duke of York married Sarah Ferguson:

A helicopter snatched you up.

The pilot, it was me.

The props, like a roulette wheel,

Stopped at felicity…

About which the kindest thing to say would be nothing, and the second kindest that John Betjeman’s old suit hardly fits a dour Yorkshireman with ambitions to be a sort of royal witch doctor. Only one of those Laureate effusions is included here, the one for HRH Prince Harry, which has some decent lines about salmon responding to a storm:

The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit

And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings,

Twisting their glints in the suspense,

Biting at the stir, beginning to move.

There speaks the poet who has fished many rivers. All this is to criticise Ted Hughes, as his work demands, from the highest level. He is a serious and authentic poet, restless in everything save his commitment to poetry, which is total and profound. His overriding merit may well be seen eventually as his own dissatisfaction with the self-definitions he has at different times achieved in verse. More than most other poets of his generation, he has mistrusted any comfortable point of rest. Ironic, all this considered, that the Muse should have punished him with the Laureateship.