Poetry in the Nuclear Age: Ted Hughes

Abstract

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for a young writer to pledge himelf, as Auden had done in his undergraduate days, to a career as a poet. The days when poetry was accorded high significance among the social mores – the times when the young Keats could make the romantic gesture of abandoning a profitable career in medicine to plunge himself into the serious but uncertain business of sculpting poems – are long since gone. The years when new instalments of verse-narrative were awaited avidly by a public for whom there was no alternative mode of amusement– when a fledgeling poet like Lord Byron could ‘awake one morning and find himself famous’ – seem unlikely to return. The aspiring poet nowadays knows that his slim volumes of verses might attract a trickle of sales and a notice in the Sunday newspapers at most.