Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes Poetry - The Jaguar, The Thought-Fox and Ghost Crabs.

This essay hasn't yet been marked by one of our teachers

You can view all our essays on Ted Hughes that have been Marked by Teachers

The first 200 words of this essay...

Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes' Poetry

Ted Hughes was born in West Yorkshire in 1930 and studied at Mexborough Grammar School, Pempbroke College, Cambridge. He shifted his studies from English to Archeology and Anthropology and became very much interested in mythology. Being considered as a poet of the Romantic period, Hughes widely uses pathetic fallacy in his poems. Inspired and influenced by D.H. Lawrence and Shamanism, Hughes makes animal imagery become his trademark in most of his poems such as The Jaguar, The Thought-Fox and Ghost Crabs. He believes in the purity of animals, which also functions as their strength and also as their superiority to man. Hughes' animal imagery is mostly used as a symbolic comparison to human beings and it puts forth how animals are in fact closer to the natural source of the universe. Portraying animals as ultimately strong creatures, Hughes draws the picture of man as limited and distant from natural instincts. To understand the usage of Hughes' animal imagery it would be better to first take a closer look at The Jaguar.

In the poem it becomes plain to see that Hughes uses animal imagery very strongly to put forth the