‘The Fox is a jolly farmer and we farm the same land’: Ted Hughes and Farming

Abstract

Wallace Stevens once wrote that ‘There must be something of the peasant in every poet.’¹ If this seems an unlikely observation from that most sophisticated of philosophical aesthetes, then it is evident that poetry in English has had more than its fair share both of great peasant poets and of others who have sought — with varying degrees of actuality and practical success — to affiliate their work with the farming life. Hughes’ own involvement with farming is perhaps complicated by his sense that the deep attraction farm work came to exert over him needed to be held in check to some extent. He realized early on that his passionate interest in farming could easily divert the energies he needed for his literary ambitions to be achieved. Nevertheless, it is clear that a close connection with farming was vitally important for Hughes at nearly all stages of his life. From his wanderings as a boy across the neighbouring farmlands in Mytholmroyd and Mexborough, through to the acquisition of his own farm with his wife Carol in 1972, and his later involvement in the Farms for City Children project with Michael Morpurgo from 1976 onwards, Hughes was connected to farming at multiple levels — both literal and imaginative — throughout his life.