Ted Hughes is responsible for introducing many of the major east European poets to a British audience via the journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, which he editted alongside Daniel Weissbort. Hughes translated many of these poets himself, with assistance from someone fluent in the original language. And in the process was exposed to trends outwith the Anglo-American and the Modernist traditions. Hughes’ attitude towards ‘literature’, as an established canon, a semiotic game or code the rules of which need to be learned, is one of wary ambivalence. He attended Cambridge on a scholarship, initially to study English, but afterwards changing to the study of Amthropology, having been warned by his ‘muse’ in a dream that his academic studies in literature were killing the centres of his own creativity. As Hughes recounts it, he fell asleep at his desk over an essay on a topic in English literature when, in his dream, the door to his room swung open and a figure with the head of a fox entered, and left a bloody hand (not paw) print impressed on his essay. ‘Stop this – you are destroying us’, the figure intoned, before turning to leave. Hughes took the hint, and changed his studies to Anthropology and Archaeology. He did not like literary or academic poetry, or the likes of which have been nurtered in academic houthouses. He preferred a poetry that engaged more directly with life. He described Shakespeare’s language, for example, as an emergency construct assembled out of any and all sources at his, Shakespeare’s, disposal, in the face of a spiritual crisis. It was not merely stage entertainment. Likewise he found in that generation of East European poets marked by World War 2 a sense of crisis that stripped their poetry of the inessential, and rendered literary embellishment and ornamentation vividly inadequate. Intially, Hughes engaged the natural world directly, and there are good grounds for arguing that he is the greatest nature poet in the English Language. But he was carried far beyond this initial starting point when he encountered the likes of Pilinsky, Holan, Popa. His mature style takes lessons learned from these poets, and fuses them with more primordial sources drawn from his studies in Antropolgy. And underlying all of this is a deep engagement with Shakespeare and an almost Elizabethan sense of the English Language as something not yet entirely settled into it’s groove but pressured by the need to improvise at a moment’s notice. Having said all this, it might be worthwhile quoting two of his poems, the first, ‘And Owl’, showing influences from the Eastern Europeans, and Anthropological sources in mythology and folktale, and the second, ‘Foxhunt’, an example of that ‘immediacy testing’ that he often subjected language to, to see if it was equal to the task.