Critical Essay | Critical Review by Daniel Hoffman

Critical Review by Daniel Hoffman

SOURCE: A review of Crow, in New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1971, pp. 6, 35-6.

[Hoffman is a poet and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following review, he analyzes Hughes's Crow, calling it "a new version of the gospel."]

"In the beginning was Scream," begins a poem revising the Book of Genesis. Ted Hughes's substitution, on this early page in Crow, of Scream for Word suggests the violent, primitive energy and the furious assault upon despair which striate the nearly 80 poems in this book. Reading Crow is a profoundly disturbing experience. This is no mere book of verses, but a wild yet cunning wail of anguish and resilience, at once contemporary, immediate, and as atavistic as the archaic myths it resembles.

In Crow, Ted Hughes, like Blake among others before him, has written a new version of the Gospel.

     Crow realized there...
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