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Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow is a literary work by poetTed Hughes, first published in 1970 byFaber & Faber, and one of Hughes' most important works. Writing for theTed Hughes Society Journal in 2012,Neil Roberts, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Sheffield, said:
Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wroteCrow, mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death ofSylvia Plath. He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered. He described Crow as his masterpiece...[1]
Recurring themes draw extensively from worldmythologies andcollective archetypes, including bothtrickster andChristian mythology.[1] A central core group of poems inCrow can be seen as an attack onChristianity.[1] The firstCrow poems were inspired by several pen and ink drawings by the American artistLeonard Baskin.[1]
It is quoted briefly in the liner notes for"My Little Town" byPaul Simon,[2] and in the epigraph ofCatspaw byJoan D. Vinge.[3]