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This poem almost reads like a sequel to the pig-slaughtering scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure – and Hardy was an important influence on Hughes. We’ve offered some further thoughts on this poem here.
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This story probably provided Hughes with the genesis for ‘The Thought-Fox’ – a poem in which Hughes struggles, not to write an analysis of a poem, but the poem itself.
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In his third year, he transferred from English to anthropology and archaeology – and his poetry-writing took off again. It came up to his desk, laid a bleeding hand on the blank page where Hughes had tried and failed to write his essay, and said: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ Hughes, who had a lifelong interest in portents, took this as a sign. That night, he had a dream that a large fox walked into his room, its eyes filled with pain. While trying to work on a literary-critical essay for his degree, Hughes retired to bed at 2am, having been unable to write the essay. 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. Hughes also translated numerous works of classical literature, including Tales from Ovid (1997) and Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia (1999). However, in between these major volumes there were other, less significant but still interesting works, such as the bizarre 1977 narrative work Gaudete (about a priest who becomes a sexual deviant) and the 1992 collection Rain-charm for the Duchy (collecting some of Hughes’ poems written in his official role as UK Poet Laureate, a post he held from 1984 until his death one of his last Laureate poems was an elegy on the death of Princess Diana in 1997). This last collection broke a 35-year silence from Hughes about the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Over the next four decades, Hughes would be a prolific poet, with landmark collections including Lupercal (1960), Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Remains of Elmet (1979 – about the ancient landscape of his homeland, rural Yorkshire), Wolfwatching (1989), and Birthday Letters, which appeared in 1998 shortly before his death. Hughes came onto the poetic scene with his debut 1957 collection The Hawk in the Rain (which his wife, Sylvia Plath, had placed with a publisher for him), and he was quickly being touted by critics as an exciting and distinctive new voice in English poetry.