SOURCE: "Is There Life After Crow? Ted Hughes's Poetry Lately," in Poetry, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 5, August, 1981, pp. 297-304.

[In the following review, Moynahan analyzes the quality and nature of Hughes's poetry since Crow.]

Among the moderns, Ted Hughes has aspired to go farther than any other in following up on the great Anglo-Irishman's tip: farther than Eliot with his Sweeney, Pound with his macho-man "Sestina Altaforte," Lawrence with his "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," Jeffers with his Monterey Peninsula hawks and rocks, Doc Williams with his "Elsie" from the Ramapo Range of North Jersey. Frost with his cackling "Witch of Coös," Maine. Of course, the search to renew poetry's energies from brutal, brutish, or primitive sources was not new to the twentieth century. It is a distinct current in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Think of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, a saurian figure amid the rocks and water pools of a far-off geological...