Ted Hughes's Poetry for Children

This article considers the poetry written for children by the late Ted Hughes, the British Poet Laureate. Looking at work that spans the length of his career, this article examines Hughes's individual collections for children, both in their own terms as poetry and in terms of their intended audience. I suggest that Ted Hughes's poetry for children was an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to create a body of work that remained true to his gift of caging the minute within real and imaginary worlds, and that he expended considerable energy in staying faithful, not only to the world as he saw it, but also to the way his work appeared in, and took its place within, that world.