Sometimes, writing feels easy: you sit at your desk, uncap your pen, and a poem pours out of you. But other times you struggle to figure out the first line, and you find yourself waiting for the words to form, for inspiration to strike. This is what Ted Hughes' "The Thought-Fox" is about: nurturing an idea as it first takes shape in your mind's depths, then coaxing the right words to the surface.
Ted Hughes' "The Thought-Fox" is an ars poetica, or a poem about writing a poem, that uses the metaphor of a thought as a fox. As the fox emerges from the dark forest and its "sharp hot stink" enters the "dark hole" of the speaker's head, inspiration strikes the speaker. The speaker puts pen to page, and voila—the poem, which a few stanzas earlier seemed arduous and impossible, is complete.
The fox's dual nature complicates the poem. On one hand, the speaker "imagine[s]" the dark forest and the fox, but he also sees them. By drawing a parallel between the poem's setting and conflict, Hughes suggests that poetic inspiration is like a fox lurking in the forest, minding its own business: for writers, the best ideas are often right in front of them, waiting to be noticed. At the same time, the dark forest is like a writer's mind: dark and dense, deep, fertile, and fecundl but also sinister and threatening. They never know what will emerge from their mind's depths, but they know they must be present and ready with pen in hand when an idea strikes.
The poem appears in Hughes' first collection, The Hawk and The Rain, published by Faber & Faber in 1957, when the poet was 27 years old. The collection received the Somerset Maugham Award, a prestigious literary prize granted to young British writers in support of their work. Decades later, "The Thought-Fox" remains one of Hughes' most celebrated poems.
