Editing Ted Hughes (section)

===Themes===
{{Quote box |align=right|quoted=|bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right
|quote =<poem>
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
</poem>
|source =From "Wind" <br/> ''[[The Hawk in the Rain]]'', 1957<ref name="poetryarchive.org"/>}}

Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.<ref name="Bellp1">Bell (2002) p1</ref> Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the [[survival of the fittest]] in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar".<ref name="Bellp1"/>

The [[West Riding]] dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.<ref name="Sagar7">Sagar (1978) p.&nbsp;7.</ref>

Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British [[bard]]ic tradition, heavily inflected with a [[modernism|modernist]], [[Jungian]], and ecological viewpoint.<ref name="Bellp1"/> He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.<ref name="Bellp1"/>