In-between the Uncertainties: Ted Hughes and the Art of Negative Capability

This paper deals with the analysis of the poems of Ted Hughes (1930-1998) from John Keats’ term, Negative Capability. In one of his letters to his brother, Keats writes that Negative Capability is such a state in which a poet is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (1817/2005, p. 60). Moreover, poets, according to Keats, have no steady character, they must have a metamorphic identity like a chameleon to adapt themselves to troublesome situations. Keatsian Negative Capability allows the reader to interpret Hughes’ poems from two distinct perspectives, one is about Hughes’ personal life with his wife, Sylvia Plath, and the other one is his public persona in England. This paper aims to reveal Hughes’ struggle with the difficulties both in his personal and public life and interpret his poems to display how he was negatively capable of surviving amid the tragedy of human existence and how he turned his suffering into a work of art in his poems such as “The Hawk in the Rain,” “Wodwo” and “Thought Fox.”