The Scream Phenomenon in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of artistic depiction of the scream in the poetry of the 20th century English poet Ted Hughes. The analysis of the poems reveals a gradual semantic expansion of the poetic image: while in early animalistic and landscape lyrics the scream is interpreted as an expression of animal suffering or the personification of wild nature, later collections containing elements of the author’s mythology show the acoustic image as a metaphor of the divine presence (“Adam and the Sacred Nine”), a symptom of split consciousness (“Prometheus on his crag”), a mechanism for healing psychological traumas (“Wolfwatching”), and also acquires cosmogonic features (“Crow,” “Cave birds”). The paradigm of the meanings ends with the “birth of the logos,” marking the beginning of the character’s communication with the outside world. The semantic transformation of the investigated motif turns out to be practically significant for the study of the author’s myth evolution. Hughes’ statements in letters and interviews, as well as the facts of biography, reflect the leitmotif formation in author’s work. This fact reveals the possibility of correlating the metaphor of the scream with Ted Hughes’ “poetic voice.”