Vol. 4, Issue 2, Part A (2022)

Ecocriticism aims to investigate the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. The environmental crisis of the recent times have upended the natural world and the comfortable nature tropes of the past no longer seem possible leading to the development of a new style of poetic expression that laments the loss of the natural world, while presenting a world plagued with environmental calamities. The interrelatedness of culture and nature in relation to the imperative connection of life and human environments is prominent in Hughes’s eco poetics based on the exploration of the environment’s influence on the poet’s imagination in shaping an ethical vision. Hughes depicts human culture’s detrimental impact on environment in order to re-evaluate human’s ability to both protect and destroy nature in his poetic space, thus interweaving environmentalism and literary creativity. This paper attempts to explore Ted Hughes’s poetry in relation to an emergent eco poetics and his ecological consciousness. Hughes’s conception of a human relationship with external nature through the examination of poetic language reveals how environmental imagination can suggest social responsibility.