All Ted Hughes's books since 'Lupercal' in 1960 have been mixtures of poems and some other element—drawings, photographs, prose, dramatic exchanges, folklore….

It is important to stress that [in Remains of Elmet] the pictures came first and that Hughes wrote the poems to them, since the connection of verse and scene is by no means close in many cases….

Hughes's poems are annotations of the scene and, though they have some sense of the deep past, with references to the Brontës and the mills of the Industrial Revolution, they do not attempt to refashion the reality of distant Elmet through a modern sensibility….

In general the poems suffer from two faults—a muscle-bound galvanism expressing itself in packed and tensile phrases listed down the page, often with no verb at all, and an excessive use of the pathetic fallacy, which goes beyond observing what men have made...