On The Beauty Of Ted Hughes’s Poetry For Children

English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is one of the most representativefigures after WWII, and he is said to be the most passionate and characteristic postwarpoet. His poems for adults, especially his animal poems, receive broad attention fromthe scholars and literary critics at home and abroad for their profound themes andfar-reaching purport. Meanwhile the children’s poetry of Ted Hughes, which werecreated mainly in his middle and later period, makes his literary career fresher andmore complete.Since the publication of his first animal poem sequence for adults The Hawk inthe Rain in1957, Ted Hughes has arrested a large number of literary critics’ attention.This poem sequence is also considered as the dawn of postwar Britain’s poetic circle.Some critics state that the publication of The Hawk in the Rain brings a refreshingbreeze to Britain’s poetic circle. And as Hughes’s first poetic collection for childrenMeet My Folks! and his other popular collections for children come out, this breezeblows on and goes further. The reason for this phenomenon is that no matter howquickly time changes, children’s poetry would always be a fresh breeze for children,even for some adults.In his middle and later literary career, Ted Hughes concerns much about how tocompose successful poems for children. He believes that a good poem needs to amuse,interest as well as satisfy the readers; meanwhile it should have the charm that nomatter how complicated the writing technique is, children can receive the message itconveys excitedly. In Hughes’s point of view, children do accept the plastic toys,that’s because these are the only objects the adults offer them, but their true drivingpassion is to get possession of the reality and the natural world. At the age whenpeople lack faith and when they can not tell what nature is, Ted Hughes searches forthe most appropriate writing language and writing technique to portray the flora andfauna for children, to make them see a brand new nature through the splendid poeticlanguage, to encourage them to discover the beauty of nature and to respect, love andprotect nature from the newfangled images of animals and plants.This thesis is divided into four chapters, discussing respectively the beauty fromsound and rhythm, the beauty from rhetorical devices, the beauty from imaginationand the beauty from themes in Ted Hughes’s poetry for children to show that this British Poet Laureate is not only an excellent poet for adults, but also a decisive poetfor children.