In 1957, Ted Hughes published his debut poetry collection The Hawk in the Rain, winner of the Harper's First Publication Prize selected by W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender, establishing Hughes immediately as a major new voice in British poetry. The title poem opens with the speaker slogging across a wind-lashed, rain-soaked field while above him a hawk rides the storm motionlessly, mastering the wind through will and physical precision. Published in London by Faber and Faber, the collection announced Hughes's lifelong poetic project of using animals — particularly wind-riding birds — as vehicles for exploring elemental violence, concentration, and spiritual power.

The Hawk in the Rain inaugurated the most sustained engagement with wind-riding birds in modern British poetry, building directly on Hopkins's Windhover while developing a harsher, more materially precise idiom that defined the dominant British poetic aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. Hughes's wind imagery — saturating collections from Lupercal and Wodwo to Crow and River — made wind a primary element of his poetic ecology, connecting him to the deep tradition of English wind poetry from Shelley through Thomas Hardy. His influence on subsequent British and Irish nature poetry, from Seamus Heaney to Simon Armitage, in terms of weather as poetic material is immense.