We now have a picture of movement, of difficulty in walking and the earth becomes a mouth swallowing, what it is exactly swallowing besides water is not known at this stage. From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London, 1993). Hughes himself interpreted literature in relation to the mother-goddess myth. His reading of Shakespeare is idiosyncratic but makes an interesting comparison with his poems. Looking in detail at one of Ted Hughes’ most famous poems … The Hawk in the Rain– Ted Hughes (from The Hawk in the Rain1957) Metaphors jumble our senses to expand our perception of the world as well as express that which is unsayable. Hughes' usage of animals like a hawk and jaguar to express his inner being speaks to us of power, constraint, anger, and unbridled energy of spirit caged in by some amoral or agnostic force more significant than our own. In a cage of wire-ribs,

Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, photographs by Fay Godwin, Rainbow Press (London, England), 1979, second revised edition published as Elmet: Poems, Faber and Faber, 1994.

The Hawk in the Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 1957)

Adapter) Seneca’s Oedipus (produced in London at National Theatre, 1968, in Los Angeles, 1973, in New York, 1977), Faber and Faber (London, England), 1969, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1972. Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 10, 1980, Peter Clothier, review of Moortown; March 15, 1998, review of The Birthday Letters, p. 7. More than fifty years after its publication, The Hawk in the Rainremains one of Ted Hughes’s most important, and most accomplished, collections. Many of Hughes’s best-known poems, such as ‘The Hawk in the Rain,’ ‘The Jaguar,’ ‘The Thought-Fox,’ and ‘Wind’—now staples of British poetry anthologies—first appeared here. These were the poems that established Hughes’s reputation as a poet of elemental sensibilities whose stressed, alliterative cadences conjured a primeval world of strength and struggle.

Sagar, Keith, Ted Hughes, Longman, 1972, enlarged as The Art of Ted Hughes, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1978.The book, dedicated to Hughes' first wife Sylvia Plath, is a collection of 40 poems. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Plath considered her husband's poetry ".. the most rich and powerful since that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas". She had typed out almost all his poems and submitted them, in this collection, to a competition for a first book of poems being run by the Poetry Centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. In February 1957 the judges, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, awarded the first prize (publication by Harper and Row) to Hughes. Marianne Moore wrote: "Hughes's talent is unmistakable, the work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction." Hughes rejected the Latinate and courtly iamb in favour of bludgeoning trochees and spondees. The strong alliteration, onomatopoeia, and hyperbole gave his poems an impact not heard in English verse since the demise of Middle English.