In his poetry, Ted Hughes searches for a way of expressing his memory and consciousness filtered through the experiences and thoughts he has accumulated since his childhood. At first his main concern is to identify the mysterious impulse to break out its energy, powers and presences in nature. So he turns toward the nature including the animals, as we find in many of his poems, and explores the meaning of his own experiences with them and identifies their nature through the poetic object’s words as well as his own languages. He describes the nature looking at and speaking to men. But when the poet conveys the nature’s or animals’s view points on human being, he functions to explore the meaning of human existence and identify the nature of animals in relation to human being. He reveals the faces of his poetic attentions of his inner world through the nature’s eyes and words, but he does not seem to deal with them directly. He transforms his poetic objects with his inner consciousness. His consciousness plays the role of master to his objects. In this process the nature of the objects are revealed as fascinating and destructive. The subject poet’s consciousness sees the ambivalent natures so clearly and deeply that it is impossible for the poet to be with them. So he keeps a distance from his objects and voices them with authoritative attitudes. The objects are not him or his own self but his Other, that is the Other to the poet himself, so the objects, even if and because it has enormous power, should be kept within the poet’s power and his authority, and transformed to the poet’s will. With this oppressive work the poet can encounter the Other as unrelated thing to him. Women and femininity are also objects in Hughes’s world. Even if they are fascinating or powerful, they are transformed to the destructive dark power of bestial or natural things. He meets them with a cold face, oppresses them as negative outer challenges, and describes them as barriers to overcome in his way to be a hero as Prometheus struggles with his rocks. As result, Ted Hughes can be evaluated as a poet with a will to live, even though he sacrifices his Other to survive his painful struggles.
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