Ted Hughes’s Poetry: On the Frontier Between Modernism and Postmodernism

Abstract

This study examines the poetic evolution of Ted Hughes by analysing his collections Lupercal (1960), Birthday Letters (1998), and Capriccio (1990) through modernist and postmodernist perspectives. While Hughes has often been aligned with the late modernist tradition, his later works – particularly Birthday Letters and Capriccio – demonstrate a shift towards postmodern concerns with subjectivity, fragmentation, and the instability of narrative authority. Drawing on theoretical insights from Antal Bókay and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, the study explores how Hughes’s engagement with myth, trauma, and autobiographical memory both extends and complicates modernist legacies. Special attention is given to the poet’s self-mythologising gestures, including his reflections in “The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly,” which illuminate a dynamic interplay between personal history and archetypal structures. The analysis also shows that Hughes’s later poetry is shaped by his ongoing poetic engagement with Sylvia Plath, whose influence is visible in both the emotional intensity and the spiritual depth of these works. By comparing the formal and thematic strategies of the three collections, the study argues that Hughes’s oeuvre occupies a liminal space between modernism and postmodernism, revealing a poetic voice that is simultaneously continuous with tradition and radically self-renewing.