Ted Hughes: The Importance of Fostering Creative Writing as Environmental Education

Abstract

Ted Hughes is one of the most important poets in English literature of the last century and his huge volume of work (including his poetry, prose, plays, translations, letters and critical essays) has received a great deal of critical attention. Hughes was, of course, much more than just a writer. Throughout his life he was deeply engaged with environmental and ecological issues, and his own sense of environmental responsibility can be seen through his local call to action. That Hughes’s work touches on political and ethical concerns related to environmental issues has been well documented by critics such as Scigaj (1991), Gifford (1995), Sagar (2005), and more recently Reddick (2017). However, the link between these concerns and the importance that Hughes attached, throughout his working life, to engaging with children’s environmental imaginations, and the depth of his educational achievements for children, have received little attention to date. This article explores Hughes’ educational achievements and his ongoing involvement in a number of projects related to helping young children to write poetry, together with his work as a children’s poetry judge, which began in the 1960s, and his role in establishing the Arvon Foundation. It also looks at his commitment to educational projects such as Farms for City Children and his founding of the Sacred Earth Drama Trust, in the 1990s. These projects exemplify the relationship between his life-long commitment to local activism, and the impact his ideas had on such organisations underlying his concern to instil what Rachel Carson (1965) called a sense of wonder, by advocating environmental consciousness together with hope in younger generations.