SOURCE: "Historical Landscape in Ted Hughes's Remains of Elmet," in Clio, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter, 1985, pp. 137-54.

[In the following essay, Haberstroh analyzes the changing landscape in Hughes's Remains of Elmet, and traces the historical forces which bring about the change.]

In Remains of Elmet, a volume of poems illustrated with photographs by Fay Godwin, Ted Hughes turns to a Yorkshire landscape to create a racial history which places the recent decline of the Calder Valley in an inevitable cycle of natural process and human response to that process. Hughes's headnote describes the latest disaster in the valley in which he was raised:

Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, is...