Fantasy of Nature in River: A Tread into the Aesthetic Landscape of Ted Hughes

Abstract

Aesthetics studies the principles of beauty and examines the reader’s affective domain response to an object. As a philosophical approach to art and life, aesthetics has adoration for beauty as its chief value. Thus, aesthetics and beauty correspond to beget a real aesthetic resonance in poetry. Poetry and fantasy are interwoven to disseminate pulchritude in all the feasible ways through language and content. Poets have their own landscape to exhibit their alluring portraits; likewise, Ted Hughes has his own style of expressing aesthetic fantasies which have mesmerized millions of readers. The present research paper aims to explore the fantasies of Ted Hughes with reference to the poems of River. The objective of the present research paper is to elicit the alluring landscapes sketched in the selected poems of Ted Hughes’ River. Hughes is popularly designated as a nature poet and is appreciated for depicting multiple faces of nature. This research paper makes an aesthetic analysis of the selected poems of River to unveil the imbibed values of aestheticism such as ‘appreciation of nature’ and employing ‘imaginative faculty’. The selected poems for the present research are “Salmon Eggs”, “Japanese River Tales”, “Whiteness”, “Ophelia” and “Dee”.