Subverting the Rational: An Appreciation of Cave Birds by Ted Hughes

Zhang Pinggong

doi:10.13189/lls.2018.060105

Abstract

This article aims to explore how in the Cave Birds poems Ted Hughes employs innovative poetic strategies to subvert the established and dominant value system of modern humanism and rational determinism. His critical attitude towards dominant value system of secular humanism and scientific determinism is constant, and his criticism about modernity enters a new stage in Cave Birds. The affirmation of what he considers as positive actually involves a good deal of abstraction from the complex predicament of human in modern world. The form of individuality and the wholeness of being that the poet propagates in Cave Birds basically demand a disengagement of consciousness from the outer reality. Through an internal and metaphorical expression of an individual's transformation, his poetic works attempt to defamiliarize the recurrent subject matter of Human-Nature relationship.

Highlights

Many Ted Hughes’ poetic works, published from the 1950s to the 1970s, are concerned with strong and sometimes violent forces of nature
With consideration of Hughes’ critical attitude towards dominant value system of humanism and determinism being constant, it is found that his criticism about modernity enters a new stage in Cave Birds (1978)
In the scheme of the Cave Birds series, he is in a prepared state necessary for "self-purification, self-purgation and selftransformation." (Hirschberg 156) [4]Some poems clearly indicate the poet's underlying contention that the spiritual transformation of the persona as variously envisaged by the poet cannot coexist with rationality, humanism and a general moral order of a highly modernized Western society

Summary

Introduction

Many Ted Hughes’ poetic works, published from the 1950s to the 1970s, are concerned with strong and sometimes violent forces of nature. Hughes writes with great powers of imagination as if from inside the birds and animals who are the subjects of many of his poems, and uses the qualities connected with them in traditional stories as well as observation of how act in real life His later works witness an enlarged scope of the poet’s themes and new dimensions to his criticism of modern Western culture. Ted Hughes wants to subvert the secular value-system of the modern Western world in its completion This is why, the poetic representation of Jung's 'individuation process' [2] which in Cave Birds involves a total estrangement from history and society, needs a more critical examination than the critics have generally done by regarding it as the final stage of the poet's spiritual development. Unlike his earlier poems, its emergence and subsequent presence is largely not so aggressive

Narrow Humanism

Human-Nature Relationship

Alternative Mode of Existence

Conclusions