‘The World in a Glance’: Ted Hughes, Anthropocene Scales, and Environmental Cosmopolitanism

Ted Hughes’s work, a popular focus for ecocritics and long considered to be intimately linked to place, is interpreted afresh here. This chapter draws on extensive archival research into Hughes’s unpublished travel diaries, fishing diaries, correspondence, research notes, and draft poems, revealing that Hughes’s environmental awareness developed international dimensions earlier than most previous scholars have recognised. The chapter identifies his astonishingly prescient research on climate change, which is archived with documents from 1960. His poetry is reinterpreted with reference to Anthropocene scientists’ work on nuclear technology, the ‘Great Acceleration,’ and issues of ozone layer depletion that were particularly current in his time. Debates about environmental cosmopolitanism and extinction in the Anthropocene are deployed to analyse his writing from a global array of locations, including the USA and Kenya; his exchange of ideas with his son, the freshwater biologist Nicholas Hughes, is linked to more recent debates about extinction. Shifts in scale between local and global are perceived in his environmental writing as his career progresses. While Hughes has been analysed extensively by ecocritics, this chapter expands the field from a focus on Hughes’s localism, towards a fuller scholarly appraisal of his environmental cosmopolitanism. The chapter argues that he did not need to know the term ‘Anthropocene’ for his work to respond to most of the major proposed thresholds for this proposed epoch.