The Hawk in the Rain - Wikipedia





	
	

	
	

	The Hawk in the Rain

	
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First edition (Faber and Faber, 1957)



The Hawk in the Rain is a collection of poems by the British poet Ted Hughes.  Published in 1957, it was Hughes's first book of poetry. The book received immediate acclaim in both England and America, where it won the Galbraith Prize.[1] Many of the book's poems imagine the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and the eponymous hawk.[1] Other poems focus on erotic relationships, and on stories of the First World War, Hughes's father being a survivor of Gallipoli.

The book, dedicated to Hughes' first wife Sylvia Plath, is a collection of 40 poems. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Plath considered her husband's poetry ".. the most rich and powerful since that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas". She had typed out almost all his poems and submitted them, in this collection, to a competition for a first book of poems being run by the Poetry Centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. In February 1957 the judges, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, awarded the first prize (publication by Harper and Row) to Hughes. Marianne Moore wrote: "Hughes's talent is unmistakable, the work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction." Hughes rejected the Latinate and courtly iamb in favour of bludgeoning trochees and spondees. The strong alliteration, onomatopoeia, and hyperbole gave his poems an impact not heard in English verse since the demise of Middle English.


Contents[edit]

[2] 


	The Hawk in the Rain
	The Jaguar
	Macaw and Little Miss
	The Thought-Fox
	The Horses
	Famous Poet
	Song
	Parlour-Piece
	Secretary
	Soliloquy of a Misanthrope
	The Dove-Breeder
	Billet-Doux
	A Modest Proposal
	Incompatibilities
	September
	Fallgrief's Girl-Friends
	Two Phases
	The Decay of Vanity
	Fair Choice
	The Conversion of the Reverend Skinner
	Complaint
	Phaetons
	Egg-Head
	The Man Seeking Experience Enquire His Way of a Drop of Water
	Meeting
	Wind
	October Dawn
	Roarers in a Ring
	Vampire
	Childbirth
	The Hag
	Law in the Country of the Cats
	Invitation to the Dance
	The Casualty
	Bayonet Charge
	Griefs for Dead Soldiers
	Six Young Men
	Two Wise Generals
	The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot
	The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar


References[edit]


	^ a b "The Private Man," The Economist November 22, 2007

	^ Earth-Moon: A Ted Hughes Website












Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Hawk_in_the_Rain&oldid=937595003"


		Categories: 	English poetry collections
	1957 poetry books
	Poetry by Ted Hughes
	Faber and Faber books




	




	





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		 This page was last edited on 26 January 2020, at 00:47 (UTC).
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