An interview with Ted Hughes

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/SSE/article/view/326/299

” One of the things those poets had
in common I think was the post-war mood of having had enough
… enough rhetoric, enough overweening push of any kind, enough
of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough of the angelic powers
and the heroic efforts to make new worlds. They’d seen it all turn
into death camps and atomic bombs. All they wanted was to get
back into civvies and get home to the wife and kids and for the
rest of their lives not a thing was going to interfere with a nice
cigarette and a nice view of the park. The second war after all
was a colossal negative revelation. In a sense it meant they re’-
coiled to some essential English strengths. But it set them dead
against negotiation with anything outside the cosiest arrangement
of society. They wanted it cosy. It was an heroic position. They
were like Eskimos in their igloo, with a difference. They’d had
enough sleeping out. Now I came a bit later. I hadn’t had enough.
I was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be
out there. It’s just as with the hawk. Where I conjured up a Jaguar,
they smelt a stormtrooper. Where I saw elementals and forces of
Nature they saw motorcyclists with machine guns on the handlebars.
At least that was a tendency…..”