An Analysis of Ted Hughes’s Children’s Poetry From the Perspective of Primitivism

Abstract

Through analyzing Ted Hughes’s children’s poetry from the perspective of primitivism, including interpreting the primitive personality of the intended juvenile audience, different animal images, multiple sensuous language and serene recurrence of farming, this thesis verifies that Hughes’s childlike nakedness of perception leads to a arbitrary combination of images which suggests a kind of primitive mode of thinking; Hughes’s instinctive ardent love of animals reflects the appreciation of the primitive world and the alienation of modern society; the sensory expression liberates readers to embrace the primitive natural world and even reaches to the integrity of subjective internal world and objective external world. In conclusion, this thesis concludes that through interpreting the multiple levels of his children’s poetry, readers can understand the primitive characteristic as well as the defamiliarazation in Ted Hughes’s poetic creation.