Ted Hughes: Crowego

Comment The poem grapples with the conflicting demands of classical and Anglo-Saxon mythology (includes allusion to Beowulf).

This is from a collection of poems called Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow (1970). Accounts of Crow’s genesis seem to vary and its publication history (where omissions, additions and editions pull in several directions) is somewhat sporadic. The Collected Poems does a fine job of grouping all these disparate elements. With Crow, Hughes creates a modern myth and creature of folklore which interacts with biblical, classical and mythical traditions.  Cut with black humour and violence, the Crow poems are among Hughes’s most striking and instigated a technical reappraisal of his approach to writing poetry.

Further Reading

Stuart Hirschberg. Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes, Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.