Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow was published by Faber and Faber in 1970 and represents the most extreme and radical work in Ted Hughes’s career. The collection — or rather, the fragment of a never-completed epic — follows a figure called Crow through a series of encounters with God, death, creation, and the fundamental violence of existence. The poems are stripped of the ornate rhetoric of Hughes’s earlier work; they are blunt, brutal, darkly funny, and unlike anything else in English poetry.
The Myth
Hughes conceived Crow as a mythological cycle — a creation epic told from the perspective of a trickster-figure who embodies everything that official creation narratives exclude: shit, blood, laughter, cruelty, refusal. Crow exists outside God’s plan. He was not created; he appeared. He cannot be killed. He is immune to beauty, impervious to suffering (his own or others’), and he laughs at everything — including his own absurdity.
The myth was influenced by trickster figures from various traditions: the Coyote of Native American mythology, the Raven of Pacific Northwest cultures, and Anansi of West African tradition. But Hughes’s Crow is also distinctly modern — a post-Holocaust, post-nuclear figure who embodies survival without redemption.
Key Poems
“A Childish Prank” — God has created man and woman but cannot wake them into life. Crow bites the Worm of desire in half and stuffs each end into the sleeping bodies. They wake — and immediately begin the agonized dance of sexual attraction. Crow laughs.
“Crow’s First Lesson” — God tries to teach Crow to say “love.” Each attempt produces monsters: a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito. Love, in Crow’s world, is inseparable from parasitism and destruction.
“Examination at the Womb-Door” — a catechism. “Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death. / Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.” Everything belongs to death except the one who passes through: Crow.
“Crow and the Birds” — while other birds do beautiful things (“the eagle soared and hung”), Crow “spraddled head-down in the beach-Loss.”
“Littleblood” — the collection’s most tender poem, addressed to a creature of pure vulnerability. “Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.”
Context: The Plath Years
The poems were written between 1966 and 1969 — the years following Sylvia Plath’s suicide (1963) and Assia Wevill’s suicide (1969). Assia, who had been Hughes’s partner, killed herself and their daughter Shura by the same method Plath had used. Hughes never spoke publicly about the relationship between these events and the Crow poems, but the connection is unmistakable: the poems are saturated with guilt, violence, the failure of love, and the impossibility of redemption.
Crow can be read as Hughes’s attempt to find a language adequate to experiences that confessional poetry — Plath’s mode — could not contain. Rather than speaking directly about personal catastrophe, he displaced it into myth, creating a figure capable of surviving what no merely human speaker could survive.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Faber and Faber, London, in October 1970. The US edition was published by Harper & Row in 1971.
Faber first printings are identified by:
- Faber and Faber imprint
- “First published in 1970” on copyright page
- Distinctive black dust jacket with Leonard Baskin crow illustration
The US edition (Harper & Row, 1971) contains additional poems not in the Faber edition.
Legacy
Crow polarized critics. Some (A. Alvarez, Keith Sagar) hailed it as Hughes’s masterpiece — the work in which he achieved his fullest power. Others found it repetitive, wilfully ugly, and self-indulgent. Seamus Heaney praised its “terrible new language” while acknowledging that it was “not a book for the faint-hearted.”
The collection has influenced subsequent poets who sought to work with myth and violence: Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald, and the broader tradition of “dark pastoral” in British poetry.
Collecting Crow
UK first edition (Faber, 1970): Fine copies in the distinctive black dust jacket bring $300–$800. The Leonard Baskin dust jacket illustration is iconic and prone to wear.
US first edition (Harper & Row, 1971): $150–$400.
Signed copies bring $800–$2,500. Hughes signed actively but early Crow-era signatures are less common.
Limited editions: A limited signed edition with Baskin prints was produced — these bring $1,000–$3,000.
Crow is Hughes’s most collected individual title after Birthday Letters, its dark power and biographical resonance making it irresistible to collectors of both poetry and literary controversy.