The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Writing for Children: Correcting Culture's Error by Lorraine Kerslake (review)

As the first book-length study of Ted Hughes's writing for children, Lorraine Kerslake's meticulously researched monograph distinguishes itself from previous ecocritical work on Hughes by its insistence on the importance of the child addressee in the writer's life-long interest in environmental concerns. Drawing extensively on interviews, letters, and other biographical material, Kerslake explores the development of Hughes's environmental sensibility as expressed in an activism intended to engage the young and in a diverse body of children's writing that includes essays, poetry, fiction, and radio plays. Central to her discussion is her contention that Hughes attributed to the natural world a "healing function" that children were uniquely positioned to embrace (1). It's a position derived from an unabashedly Romantic understanding of childhood, and Kerslake places great importance on the passage from Winter Pollen (1994) that furnishes her study's subtitle: "Every new child is nature's chance to correct culture's error" (qtd. in 61). The result is a study that does much to trace the trajectory of Hughes's career as an environmental writer and activist while leaving the reader wanting stronger insights into individual texts.

In the introduction, Kerslake asserts that a childhood recognition of humans' alienation from the natural world led Hughes to a life-long "healing quest" (1) guided by shamanic practices aimed at liberating the senses and reestablishing the connections between culture and the natural world. Kerslake presents this project partly as Hughes's personal journey of recovery after the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill and the death of his daughter Shura, and partly as the expression of a public-facing interest in "reconnect[ing] a society that has become … alienated from nature" (1). The subsequent discussion is divided into two parts. The first, "Speaking Through the Voice of Nature," comprises two chapters that trace the early development of Hughes's ecological sensibility and articulate various ecocritical frameworks for understanding the poet's children's writing. The second, "Correcting Culture's Error," offers more detailed analysis of Hughes's writing for the young, organized genre by genre and chronologically, though the discussion often leans heavily on biography and sees Hughes's work as being haunted by Plath's death.

Chapter 1 recounts the period from the writer's boyhood in the Calder Valley in the 1930s to his early adulthood at Cambridge. Drawing on interviews and autobiographical essays, Kerslake emphasizes two formative elements of Hughes's childhood: the industrialized Yorkshire landscape, where the writer spent his early years hunting and fishing with his brother, and Hughes's encounters with Kipling's The Jungle Book, Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter, and later Robert Graves's The White Goddess, which laid the foundations for an interest in shamanism.

Chapter 2 begins by locating the seeds of Hughes's sense of environmental justice in his arrival in America with Plath in 1957 and his reading of Rachel Carson's early work on ocean life. Kerslake then recounts Hughes's environmental activism in the 1970s, including his involvement in the Farms for City Children project, and briefly surveys various strands of ecocritical theory—social ecology, deep ecology, and ecofeminism—that inform her later discussion of Hughes's writing for the young.

Chapter 3, which might have fit equally well in the first section, continues developing a framework for reading Hughes. Following an extensive overview of scholarship on Hughes, with an emphasis on the foundational work of Lissa Paul and Claas Kazzer, Kerslake turns to Poetry in the Making (1967), a book intended for classroom use that she sees as "central to Hughes's life-long commitment to involving young people in writing" (53). Here Kerslake emphasizes Hughes's indebtedness to Romantic ideals of imagination and the immediacy of experience as well as his belief in the redemptive and therapeutic qualities of poetry addressed to children, who are "more...