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Article: Depression and Ted Hughes's Crow, or through the Looking Glass and What Crow Found There.(20th-century poet)
- Article from:
- Twentieth Century Literature
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Hofstra University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Two aspects of Ted Hughes's Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow have proved hard to swallow for some critics, namely, the book's language and its imagery, or as Roy Fuller puts it, "the pathological violence of its language, its anti-human ideas, its sadistic imagery" (297). Fuller points out three things here, although it might be more accurate to speak of Crow's antiliberal humanist ideas, assuming that Crow has any ideas of its own, which is not certain. In any case, the epithet "anti-human" seems to reflect here only the ideas, or rather ideals, of a certain type of criticism. Writing from much the same point of view, Geoffrey Thurley finds Crow "a somewhat ...