Ted Hughes and the Biological Fall

Abstract

The British poet Ted Hughes offers an undeniably religious vision of the world, combining devotion to a Robert Graves-style goddess figure with an enduring fascination with Christian cosmology and biblical stories. He pursues science, particularly anthropology and palaeontology, with equal interest. These interests intersect in an essay Hughes wrote, ostensibly about William Golding’s novel The Inheritors, in which he attempts to unite a lapsarian reading of the human condition with the (at the time) latest scientific developments concerning human evolution. Taking Hughes’s article as a starting point, I explore the ways in which this lapsarian-evolutionary perspective on humanity informs Hughes’s own creative output, locating resonant Old Testament passages which appear to underwrite his project and providing a critique of his ideas along both scientific and theological lines.