18 pages • 36 minutes read
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“Wind” appears in Ted Hughes's first poetry collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The poem describes a violent storm that attacks the speaker’s house and landscape, showcasing Hughes's keen focus on the awe-inspiring and terrific power of nature. In sharp contrast to the sentimentality and flowery descriptions that characterized the traditional poetry of Hughes’s contemporaries, “Wind” employs precise, spare, and savage language to fully evoke its topic.
Juxtaposed with the natural storm is a quieter but no less endangered human storm, within which the speaker and his partner have ended an ongoing argument in a strained stalemate. They unsuccessfully attempt to overcome their terror at the chaos outside to take comfort and safety in the shelter of their house. Hughes wrote and published “Wind” during his marriage to troubled American poet Sylvia Plath; she committed suicide after Hughes left her for a woman with whom he was having an affair. The couple’s literary partnership was as prolific as it was creatively fruitful, but their personal discord grew legendary, haunting Hughes for the remainder of his life.
Poet Biography
Ted Hughes was born Edward J. Hughes on August 17, 1930, to a rural family in the farming community Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England where he lived for the first six years of his life.
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