Lupercal

Lupercal was Ted Hughes’s second collection, containing some of his most brilliant animal poetry. It confirmed his reputation as a major talent in British poetry. ‘Hughes has found his own voice, created his own artistic world and has emerged as a poet of the first importance . . . What Ted Hughes has done is to take a limited, personal theme and, by an act of immensely assured poetic skill, has broadened it until it seems to touch upon nearly everything that concerns us.’ Al Alvarez, Observer , 27 March, 1960 In language that is by now utterly distinctive, the poems both describe and deliver a kind of psychic shock. Hughes’s singularity of vision provides a ready symbiosis between theme and subject — the brute survival instinct of ‘Hawk Roosting’ or ‘Pike’, for instance; the rapturous attention bestowed upon ‘An Otter’ or ‘The Bull Moses’; the pervasive legacy of human history that can be seen to saturate a Hughesian landscape. Lupercal is as vital and urgent today as it was when it was first published, its edict, implicit in every poem: to wake up, to pay attention.