Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ÇANKAYA UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES (CUJHSS), cilt.18, sa.2, ss.399-409, 2024 (Hakemli Dergi)
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.”