Ted Hughes, the Chthulucene, and the Child Audience.
How a poet’s fantastical creatures help children see the world anew
Dustin Humes, Unsplash.
Ted Hughes is one of Britain’s best-known poets, a writer whose work explores nature’s raw, untamed power. But beyond his intense, often brooding poetry for adults, Hughes also wrote for children — stories and poems filled with strange creatures, hybrid beings, and deep ecological themes.
Meanwhile, Donna Haraway, an American scholar in science, technology, and feminist studies, has explored how we think about our relationship with the natural world. In her book Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway challenges rigid boundaries between humans, machines, and animals. She introduced the concept of the Chthulucene—a vision of the world where human and non-human lives are deeply entangled, rejecting the idea that humans dominate the planet.
By looking at Hughes’s children's books through Haraway’s lens, we can uncover how his stories — filled with mechanical giants, talking animals, and surreal families—offer a radical way for young readers to think about nature, technology, and their place in an interconnected world.
Building relationships with entities and species other than those tied by ancestry and genealogy and paying particular attention to the idea of tentacular thinking and mutual entanglements with both nonhuman and ‘other’ species was conceptualised by Haraway in a theory she called ‘kin’. It is, she says, ‘a wild category [in which] all sorts of people do their best to domesticate’. Hughes himself foreshadowed Haraway, with his own ideas of ‘meshes’ and entanglements between human and nonhuman entities, educating children about mutual respect.
Haraway’s concept of ‘natureculture’ focuses on companion species and traces the different ways in which humans can ‘become’ one as we connect to all that is nonhuman. This concept opens up a dialogue between the human, animal and nature because it acknowledges that humanity does not equate to superiority but instead is mixed up in relations between species that should not be separated.
By blurring the boundaries of what we consider to be ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, we stop taking for granted what has been previously set out as fact by humans. When we extend the subjectivity of the human to include a fusion with nonhuman entities, the ‘traditional’ human being is thoroughly disputed.
‘A dialogue commences,’ says Haraway, ‘interrogating the intimate experiences found in the boundaries between culture/nature, human/nonhuman, organic/inorganic. From this vantage point, we can see ourselves as fully implicated in the world and as cohabiters with others.’
The Chthulucene: A New Way of Seeing the World
We are used to hearing that we live in the Anthropocene — a geological age where human activity has altered the Earth’s climate, landscapes, and ecosystems. The ideas of the Anthropocene allow writers and theorists to think about place, scale, planet and ecological interconnection.
But while this term allows for an exploration of humanity’s environmental impact, Haraway argues that it maintains a focus on humans rather than the larger web of life. Instead, she proposes the Chthulucene, named after the Greek word chthon (meaning ‘earth’ or ‘underworld’), to describe a time of multispecies collaboration, where humans are just one part of a vast, interwoven system of life.
This conceptualisation is usefully applicable to Hughes’s children’s writing and the environmental education of the modern child. In the Chthulucene, however, survival depends on relationships, cooperation, and the acknowledgement that humans do not stand apart from nature but exist within it.
Haraway envisions the world as full of ‘tentacular thinking’ — Interconnected, looping, and tangled relationships, much like the tendrils of an octopus or the sprawling roots of a tree: ‘tentacularity… wound with abyssal and dreadful graspings… in the generative recursions that make up living and dying’. She suggests that making ‘kin’ is of the upmost importance in the Chthulucene. ‘Kin’, she has written, is ‘making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans… all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense’. The effect of this idea deepens our connection to, and responsibility, for other species, and reevaluates the anthropocentrism of many narratives that have been told about humankind.
Whereas the Anthropocene posits humans as the single most influential species on the planet, responsible for causing significant global warming, Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ presents a radically different interpretation. She argues that the Anthropocene is too focused on the future and that there should be no clear distinctions drawn between humanity and the nonhuman world, and that there needs to be a relentless focus on the present.
The Chthulucene is the most appropriate mechanism for debating the importance of multispecies and the possibility of harmonious living between human and nonhuman. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in precarious human-driven times attempting to merge the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binary.
Hughes’s children’s literature — particularly Meet My Folks!, The Iron Man, and The Iron Woman — anticipate these ideas, inviting young readers into a world where humans and nonhumans interact as kin rather than adversaries. When Hughes is at his most prescient, he deconstructs a human-centred sense of our species as superior to others. By turns humorous, unsettling and radically green, these thoughts have potentially profound implications for the way we treat other species.
Strange Families: Hughes’s Vision of Kinship
Hughes’s early children’s poems, Meet My Folks! describe each member of an extraordinarily strange family, often in comical ways. When describing the assortment of poems in a 1959 letter to Esther and Leonard Baskin, Hughes writes, ‘The general drift of the poems is – “Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel”.’
‘My Other Granny’ embodies vivid images of mutual entanglements with the Grandma character, who happens to be an octopus, linking her tentacles between the human narrator and non-humans. The poem opens matter-of-factly:
My Granny is an Octopus
At the bottom of the sea
And when she comes to supper
She brings her family.
This portrayal of an extended marine family reflects Haraway’s concept of kinship — where relationships are not limited by blood or species. The poem invites children to see non-human creatures as part of their world, fostering curiosity and empathy rather than superiority over nature, supporting Haraway’s desire for ‘flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages’.
Some of her cousins are lobster
Some floppy jelly fish –
What would you be if your family tree
Grew out of such a dish?
Throughout Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, she discusses the octopus through a symbolic lens: ‘Octopuses are called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for their predatory habits’. The comparison between spiders and octopus relates back to Haraway’s ideas of mutual entanglement between animal species and human and nonhuman entities. She continues: ‘They are good figures for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the Chthulucene… mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs.’
In line with Haraway’s entanglement between human and nonhuman, Hughes’s octopus-Granny can be read in a similar way. The poem continues with the narrator’s father asking the octopus-Granny how things are ‘Down in the marvellous deep?’. In response ‘Her face swells up, her eyes bulge huge/And she begins to weep’. Hughes’s choice of an octopus highlights the emotional intelligence of the animal-human character of the poem.
‘Adult octopuses’, life scientists Sam Adams and Steve Burbeck have written, ‘are clever, adaptable and rapid learners. Experts speculate that most octopus behaviors are learned independently rather than being based on instinct.’ Considering this, the octopus-granny possesses the emotional capability to differentiate between the nonhuman and human worlds and therefore evokes great sadness at that realisation that she will never fully be part of the human family. The poem closes:
Then out of her eyes there bring two drops
That plop into her saucer –
And that is all she manages,
And my Dad knows he can’t force her.
And when they’ve gone, my ocean-folk,
No man could prove they came –
For the sea-tears in her saucer
And a man’s tears are the same.
The motif of the octopus-Granny crying into her saucer challenges the child audience to question why she could be upset, yet again confirms that she acknowledges that she will always be ‘other’ compared to her human family. The comparison to a man’s tears as being the same as her ‘sea-tears’ also links with mutual entanglements and kinship between the human family and their nonhuman relatives. The humans are accepting and respectful of her. This, despite her physical differences, aligns with Haraway’s call for the flattening of any supposed interspecies hierarchy.
A Message for the Future
Hughes’s children’s stories don’t offer simple lessons. Instead, they immerse young readers in worlds where the boundaries between human, animal, and machine dissolve. Whether it’s an octopus-grandmother, a colossal iron man, or a sludge-covered cyborg-woman, his characters invite children to rethink the rigid categories that separate species, technologies, and ecosystems. Haraway’s work gives us a framework to understand Hughes’s storytelling in a modern context. At a time when climate change and environmental destruction feel overwhelming, both Hughes and Haraway remind us that survival isn’t about human dominance — it’s about relationships, kinship, and seeing beyond ourselves.
Hughes himself, though often sceptical of humanity’s ability to change, recognized the urgency of ecological awareness: ‘If the human race fails to survive all this, it will be because it can’t get interested in its own annihilation. Too interested in something else, presumably.’
Perhaps that ‘something else’ is what Hughes’s stories — and Haraway’s philosophy — urge us to see differently. For today’s children, growing up in an era of ecological uncertainty, these stories remain as vital as ever.
Bibliography
Adams, Sam S., and Steve Burbeck. “Beyond the Octopus: From General Intelligence toward a Human-like Mind.” In Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence, edited by Pei Wang and Ben Goertzel, 151–167. Amsterdam: Atlantis Press, 2012.
Bate, Jonathan. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. New York: Harper, 2015.
Billingsley, John. A Laureate’s Landscape: Walks Around Ted Hughes’ Mytholmroyd. Hebden Bridge: Northern Earth, 2007.
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 1991.
———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1991.
———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.
———. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hughes, Ted. Collected Poems for Children. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.
Kerslake, Lorraine. The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children: Correcting Culture’s Error. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
Reid, Christopher, ed. Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.
Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Solnick, Sam. Poetry and the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
