Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50: A Seminar

In October 1970 the poet Ted Hughes published  Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. In March 2021, The Ted Hughes Society and Hughes’s alma mater, Pembroke College Cambridge, hosted a seminar devoted to the extraordinary power and enduring life of Crow, a collection which many regard as one of the twentieth century’s most important works of poetry. 

In the fifty years since Crow’s publication, poets, sculptors, musicians and environmentalists have been amongst those disturbed and inspired by its mysterious energy, its anger and its comedy. To mark this anniversary, a distinguished panel explored Crow on the page and Crow through the air:

Dame Marina Warner: Patron of the Ted Hughes Society, eminent novelist, mythographer and memoirist, and author of the foreword to Faber and Faber’s 50th Anniversary Edition of Crow

Alice Oswald: leading poet, editor of A Ted Hughes Bestiary, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, who in November 2020 made Crow the subject of her third Oxford lecture.

Mark Cocker: naturalist, environmental activist, and author of Crow Country 

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski: critically-acclaimed poet and musician. 

Alongside this panel, Peter Fydler, Terry Gifford, Malcolm Guite, Matt Howard, Lissa Paul, Katherine Robinson, and Mark Wormald also shared aspects of their own encounters with Hughes’s Crow, and Society and Pembroke members contributed to the discussion.

The seminar also included a first view of Irish painter Barrie Cooke’s wild responses to Crow, in charcoal, ink and enamel, from his extraordinary literary archive and collection, recently acquired by Pembroke College. The event also began with a broadcast of the recent recording of music inspired by Crow composed by Benjamin Dwyer.

Bibliography

A bibliography to accompany the recording of the seminar has been prepared by Mick Gowar, Secretary of the Ted Hughes society.

Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50: Critical Readings

Leading Hughes scholar Neil Roberts has written an introduction to Crow for the Ted Hughes Society which is an excellent place to get started reading about the book:

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.

Read the rest of Neil’s introduction here.

In a ground-breaking article for the latest issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal, Peter Fydler charted in illuminating detail the origins – and most importantly the competing origin-myths – of Hughes’s Crow project:

There are, of course, as many versions of the genesis of the character Crow as there are of the book, Crow: From The Life & Songs of the Crow, itself but I shall restrict myself to four which, to make matters more complicated, do not map directly onto the four versions of the origination myth. The four key versions of the book are: the 1970 UK edition; the 1971 US edition which included seven new poems (and was very similar to the expanded UK edition); the 1973 Faber limited edition, which included three more poems and 12 drawings by Baskin; and, finally, as the fiftieth anniversary of its publication looms, my totally fictitious “Definitive 50th Anniversary Box Set” which, to serve my argument, would have to include around 100 poems, the 12 Baskin Drawings and, crucially and prominently, three artworks that I will discuss later...

To read the rest of ‘Crow Zero: Leonard Baskin, Ted Hughes, and the Birth of a Legend’ in The Ted Hughes Society Journal here.

Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50: Previous Discussions

Crow has been a subject of critical conversation ever since its publication. Here you can find some previous discussions from Hughes himself as well as later leading voices on the collection, including panellists from the ‘Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50’ seminar:

Seven Crows a Secret (National Film Board of Canada, 1994)