'Throttle College'? Ted Hughes's Cambridge Poetry

Abstract

Ted Hughes often characterised his time at Cambridge as uninspiring and unproductive. Yet this article is the first scholarly study to examine the surviving work that Hughes produced while he was a student. I publish a student poem of Hughes's for the first time, and deploy highly innovative, original archival work from the Cambridge University Library and British Library to show that Hughes was reading voraciously and writing prolifically while he was at University. I demonstrate how early work by Hughes was remarkably prescient of his later, collected poems.