Who wrote Bayonet Charge?

• A. Wilfred Owen
• B. Seamus Heaney
• C. Ted Hughes
• D. Carol Ann Duffy

Answer: (C)

Bayonet Charge relies on visceral, muscular language that places you inside the moment of combat—the body in motion, the rush of steel, the confusion and strain of fear turning into action. That immediacy and focus on raw physical experience is a hallmark of Ted Hughes’s early war poetry. He tends to strip away romantic or patriotic rhetoric and zero in on what the soldier endures in the heat of battle, using sharp imagery and compact, punchy lines to convey intensity and danger. The poem sits with Hughes’s style rather than the gentler or more reflective tendencies you might associate with other poets in the list. So the writer of Bayonet Charge is Ted Hughes.