SOURCE: "Wotan and Ted Hughes's Crow," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 38-44.

[In the following essay, Witte discusses the mythological influences on Hughes's Crow.]

Ted Hughes has collected in Crow what appear to be the fragments of apocalyptic experience. Everything in the world into which Crow survives seems about to explode, compelled by intolerable internal pressures. The most trivial event might be cause for astonishing cruelties. But unlike the brutal naturalism frequently explored in the earlier animal poems, in "Pike" and "Hawk Roosting," the violence in Crow has a martial character. The grass, even, "camps in its tussock / With its spears and banners." And Crow's are the warrior's trails: courage, cunning, the indomitable will to survive, and the sharpness of eye and talon. Battle, furthermore, provides metaphor for the two ideological conflicts dominating Crow's experience: first, Crow's aversion to the Christian myth and, second, Crow's...