ABSTRACT
T. Hughes’s ‘crow’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘peat bog’ have come not only to stand for some of the prevailing anxieties of the late twentieth-century to which conventional religious symbolism offers an inadequate response, but also to show how imagery develops the status of contemporary literary myth. Heaney’s myth is earth-bound, deeply personal, digging down into the atrocities of an early and pre-Christian age: bog-bodies preserved in centuries of peat reveal their secrets slowly and painstakingly through his poetry’s verbal archaeology. Ted Hughes’s Crow is a poetic sequence intended to form a composite book, with poems by Hughes and engravings by the American artist Leonard Baskin whose image of ‘Crow’ dominates the dust cover. Hughes was also explicit about the genesis of the crow poems and the invitation by Leonard Baskin ‘to make a book with him simply about crows’. The body of Baskin’s ‘Crow’ has the solidity of dense matter.
