literary review Areté. They relate mainly to the process of editing Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and also contain a sequence of drafts of letters in which Raine attempts to explain to Hughes his disinclination to publish Hughes's poem The Cast in an anthology he was editing, on the grounds that it might open Hughes to further attack on the subject of Sylvia Plath. "Dear Ted, Thanks for the poem. It is very interesting and would cause a minor sensation" (4 April 1997). The poem was eventually published in Birthday Letters and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997). Themes Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar". The West Riding dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence. Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian, and ecological viewpoint. He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious. Translation In 1965, he founded with Daniel Weissbort the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which involved bringing to the attention of the West the work of Czesław Miłosz, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known, from such countries as Poland and Hungary, then controlled by the Soviet Union. Hughes wrote an introduction to a translation of Vasko Popa: Collected Poems, in the "Persea Series of Poetry in Translation", edited by Weissbort. which was reviewed with favour by premiere literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University