The Hawk in the Rain

[1] Many of the book's poems imagine the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and the eponymous hawk.

[1] Other poems focus on erotic relationships, and on stories of the First World War, Hughes's father being a survivor of Gallipoli.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Plath considered her husband's poetry "the most rich and powerful since that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas".

Marianne Moore wrote: "Hughes's talent is unmistakable, the work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction."

Writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Keith Sagar said, "Hughes rejected the Latinate iamb in favour of bludgeoning trochees and spondees.