Ted Hughes Gives Up English Lit

English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998).

“In later readings of his poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, he often gave an account of the strange dream that prompted his abandoning the study of English Literature [while an undergraduate at Cambridge] as an academic subject. He had spent all evening struggling to complete an essay of literary criticism. In his dream that night, a fox appeared that was the size of a wolf, and placed its paw, which seemed to be a bleeding human hand, flat palm-down on the blank space of Hughes’s page, saying, ‘Stop this––you are destroying us.’ As it lifted the hand away from the page, Hughes saw the blood-print glistening wet. Hughes understood that mark as an image of his own pain at forcing himself to go against his nature. The poem was written two years after the dream, but the meaning was clear to him as he woke.”—Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001)

Hughes reads “The Thought-Fox”: