Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence 'owe unacknowledged debt' to 'uncelebrated' Amy Lowell

Paper claims Lowell’s earlier writings can be seen in Hughes’s poem Pike and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but her gender and sexuality made her unpopular

Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised. But Hughes’s image of a fish with “green tigering the gold” has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes “confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work” in a new paper.

According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians, which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures, Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems.

Lowell was a rather large lady, a lesbian, a woman, so for all these reasons she’s unpopular, uncelebrated

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