SOURCE: A review of Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 385-6.

[In the following review, Firchow gives reserved praise for the poems in Hughes's Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems.]

Since succeeding to the office of Poet Laureate in 1984, Ted Hughes has regularly published poems on a variety of appropriate princely and royal occasions. Whereas versified attacks on the royal family, even scurrilous ones, would nowadays probably raise few critical eyebrows if perpetrated by a major contemporary poet, this kind of hyperconventional poetic activity strikes one as more than a little odd. On the face of it, as Hughes himself must be aware (along with, perhaps, at least a few members of the royal family), there is something quite absurd about the whole enterprise, more or less like imagining a royalist poet from St. Louis or...