Learning To Sing, Learning To Love: Rereading Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems

Abstract

Learning To Sing, Learning To Love: Rereading Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems Patrick Jackson (bio) Ted Hughes’s Crow poems, made most famous in his book Crow: The Life and Songs of the Crow, are of central importance to the critical study of Hughes’s work. Hughes himself considered them his “masterpiece,” explaining that the period during which they were written was the most intensely creative one of his life (Roberts 71). But despite all the critical attention the Crow poems have received, they have only very recently been examined in a biographical context. As Heather Clark has noted, critics have avoided discussing the poems in terms of Hughes’s personal life is for two reasons: first, because they have respected his wish for his poems to be read on their own, absent of biography; and, second, because the poems themselves go to great lengths to be impersonal, working on a mythological level of meaning rather than a personal or biographical level (Clark 187, Middlebrook 243). However, it has recently come to light that these poems were in fact very personal to Hughes. In a series of letters Hughes wrote to the critic Keith Sagar, only recently published, Hughes explains that his Crow poems were, at the time he wrote them, an expression of the grief and pain he felt in the aftermath of the most pivotal event of his life: the suicide of his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath (Letters 718). This has been a startling revelation and casts the poems in an entirely new light. For over three decades, the poems had been read only as public expressions of public concerns— as, for instance, criticisms of the modern world or as meditations on human existence. But now these public expressions need to be linked to the private grief that was their source. How are these poems elegies? And, more specifically, how does Hughes write a public poem about a grief that he wants keep private? One way to begin to answer such questions is to examine a voice recording Hughes made in 1997 (the last year of his life) of the Crow poems, a recording that demonstrates some of the ways Hughes coped with his private despair over Plath’s death in the public arena of his poetry. First, it would help to outline the events that led up to the publication of the Crow poems. In 1963, Plath committed suicide in her London flat. Two years later, in 1965, her husband and literary executor, Hughes, published the book of poems that established Plath as one of the most important voices of modern poetry, Ariel. That Hughes felt the burden of Plath’s death and her poetic legacy is clear, and its effect on his own poetry was [End Page 300] undeniably great. By his own account, he stopped writing poems almost altogether for several years (Letters 718). This suspension of creative work was in part because he needed to take over the duty of editing and publishing Plath’s poems. But it also took a major toll on Hughes’s emotional life, and it was this more than anything that interfered with his poetry. He felt creatively paralyzed by Plath’s suicide, partly because he felt the need to express his grief in his work but did not want to publish his feelings directly to the public, a public that was not only hungry for scandalous details about her death and their relationship but also increasingly hostile to Hughes. Some readers and critics even openly accused Hughes of being responsible for Plath’s suicide because of his affair with Assia Wevill, which had prompted Plath and Hughes to separate. One American poet, Robin Morgan, went so far as to write a poem that accused Hughes of murdering Plath, and some people afterward took it upon themselves to shout the poem at Hughes during his public readings (Badia 183). By the late 1960s, Hughes began to write poetry again, and what he produced were the Crow poems. These poems center on a mythological, anthropomorphic bird named Crow, who is both a trickster and a survivor and who is always scavenging for his next meal in a bleak...