TED HUGHES'S IDEAS ON THE ACT OF POETIC CREATION

Ted Hughes has some very definite ideas about poetry, its functions, the way it should be written and about his own role as a poet. He spoke and wrote a great deal about these ideas, most of them presented in the essay Poetry in the Making published in 1967. The efficacy of his view on the process of writing poetry was illustrated with the poem 'The Thought Fox'. This poem has a special place in the Hughes canon. It is printed first in his Selected Poems, and he said that it was the first poem he saved after six years of total confusion, so that it literally inaugurates his mature poetic activity.