Lupercal was published by Faber and Faber in 1960 and confirmed the promise of The Hawk in the Rain with even greater assurance. The title refers to the Lupercalia — the Roman wolf-festival celebrating the she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus — and announces the collection’s concern with animal vitality, fertility, and the primitive energies that lie beneath civilization’s surface.
The Collection
Lupercal contains many of Hughes’s most famous individual poems — pieces that have entered the canon of twentieth-century English poetry through anthologies, school syllabuses, and the sheer force of their language.
“Hawk Roosting” — “I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.” The hawk speaks in first person, declaring its absolute sovereignty: “I kill where I please because it is all mine.” The poem has been read as a portrait of fascism, of divine will, of pure natural authority — Hughes insisted it was simply a hawk.
“Pike” — a long poem tracking the pike from aquarium specimens to the legendary monsters of a pond “as deep as England.” The poem builds through increasingly ominous stages to its final image: “Past nightfall I dared not cast.” Hughes transforms a fishing memory into a myth about what waits beneath the surface of the known world.
“Thrushes” — “Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn.” The thrushes’ efficiency — their ability to act without hesitation or self-consciousness — is contrasted with human indecision. “Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained / Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats / Gives their days this bullet and automatic / Purpose?”
“View of a Pig” — a dead pig on a farm barrow. The poem examines the corpse with clinical detachment, noting how death transforms a living creature into mere matter. The pig “was too dead. Just so much / A poundage of lard and pork.”
“An Otter” — celebration of the otter’s double life, at home in water and on land. “Underwater eyes, an eel’s / Oil of water body.”
Method
Where The Hawk in the Rain sometimes struggled between the poet’s ambition and his technique, Lupercal achieves a seamless fusion of observation and metaphysics. The animals are rendered with naturalist precision — every detail of feather, scale, and muscle is accurate — but they are simultaneously mythic presences, embodiments of forces that exceed human understanding.
Hughes’s language in Lupercal achieves a distinctive weight. The poems are packed with consonant clusters, monosyllables, and Anglo-Saxon root words that give the verse a physical density matching its subjects. This is not the mellifluous lyricism of the English tradition but something harder and older — closer to Anglo-Saxon poetry than to Keats or Tennyson.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Faber and Faber, London, in March 1960. The US edition was published by Harper & Brothers later the same year.
Faber first printings are identified by:
- Faber and Faber imprint
- “First published in mcmlx” on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
The collection won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize, confirming Hughes’s position as the most important young poet in England.
Collecting Lupercal
UK first edition (Faber, 1960): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $300–$700. Second collections by major poets are often scarcer than debuts, as publishers still print cautiously.
US first edition (Harper, 1960): $200–$500.
Signed copies bring $600–$2,000.
Lupercal is essential Hughes — the collection that contains more of his “greatest hits” than any other single volume, and a cornerstone of any collection of postwar English poetry.