Ted Hughes and a visceral crow

from Thirteen Ways of Considering Black Birds by John Bennett and John Laidler

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lyrics

At university I fell inside the poetry collection ‘Crow’.

‘A final try,’ said God. ‘Now, LOVE.’
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man’s bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth . . .

I read Crow as a bestial hymn, a litany & ritual using the archaic power that language naturally hoards (an originary poetics). This was before I knew the history. Ted Hughes wrote Crow after the self-inflicted deaths of his mistress Assia Wevill and their four-year-old daughter Shura, six years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. He revealed: ‘The idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow would sing. In other words songs with no music whatsoever.’

Hughes was always a visceral poet. After that last tragedy, he retreated to Yorkshire, bred sheep and cattle and wrote about life and death on the farm.
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Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’s First Lesson’, from Crow (1970), Selected Poems 1957-1981, Faber, 1982, p117.

E. Faas, 'Ted Hughes's Crow', London Magazine, January 1971, p17. Reprinted in Ted Hughes: the unaccommodated universe, California, Black Sparrow, 1980

Ted Hughes, Moortown, Faber, 1979.