‘The Thought-Fox’
‘The Thought-Fox’ is, for many readers, especially young readers, their favourite Hughes poem. The mere glance I gave the poem in The Art of Ted Hughes is completely inadequate. There was even less excuse for neglecting the poem in The Laughter of Foxes. Hughes almost always began his readings with ‘The Thought-Fox’, describing it as ‘my first animal poem’. In fact his first animal poem was ‘The Jaguar’, written in 1954. That Hughes opened both his Selected Poems and his New Selected Poems with ‘The Thought-Fox’ suggests that he thought of it as an overture announcing the central theme of all his subsequent poems. Obviously it is an animal poem; but it is also, perhaps primarily, something else. The opening words of the poem ‘I imagine’ confirm what we have already been alerted to in the title, that this is not, primarily, a poem about a fox, but a poem about writing a poem, about the kind of thinking which produces poems, or produced them for Hughes at that stage of his career. In 1956, the year after the writing of the poem, Hughes tried to explain this kind of thinking to his wife Sylvia Plath. He tried very hard, very patiently, because it was what he thought she most needed to learn to release her own poetic imagination.