The unbelievably tragic suicide of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, earlier this year calls to mind how Ted Hughes lived under the shadow of Plath’s 1963 suicide until his death in 1998, only gradually shedding the false public stigma that the whole thing was all his fault, making decisions, some solid, some questionable, about the posthumous publication of her work, and trying to keep Nicholas and his older sister, Frieda, out of the spotlight as their mother’s fame skyrocketed. In other words, how can anyone not wish to leave Frieda, the family’s last surviving member, alone with her grief?
But Plath and Ted Hughes dedicated their lives to poetry, and Frieda herself is a highly accomplished poet, and so it seems good and right to take a look back at Ted Hughes’s Crow, the book of poetry he published eight years after Plath’s suicide, and two years after the suicide of his lover, Assia Wevill.
From Animal Despair to Biological Optimism
To read Crow is to unearth the picture of a man alone with his grief, as well as with the healing power of words and images, and symbolism and legend. Hughes says, in an essay collected in Winter Pollen, that the book was inspired by the “Trickster Tales” of early and primitive literatures.” Whereas Black Comedy, Hughes says, derives from “animal despair and suicidal nihilism that afflict a society,” Trickster Tales derive from “the unkillable, biological optimism that supports a society.”
While such statements do little to prepare the reader for the emotional experience of reading the book, they do serve as stepping stones toward trying to grasp its immense scope. The character “Crow” (not a bird-man, but a bird) is born, unlike Adam, into a raw, “fallen” world, where the resources and spirit needed to live must be searched for in the depths, and dark moments provide otherwise unavailable opportunities to actively embrace hope. The poems are in the grip of despair, but also flow with an authentic, earned vitality.
In the Light of Emily Dickinson
Crow, like all of Hughes’s work, has lost none of its original power, thanks largely to how Hughes’s language is made out of such durable materials. In the introduction to his selection of Emily Dickinson poems (also collected in Winter Pollen), Hughes marvels at how Dickinson’s words “lie in precise and yet somehow free relationships.” Hughes developed a similar method. So many of the lines in Crow are made up of such robust words and rhythms that they close on the mind like a steel trap, and yet are phrased so originally that they encourage freedom of mind as well.
Hughes goes on to call Dickinson’s work “a pictogram concentration of ideas into which she codes a volcanic elemental imagination.” Once again, he could be describing the opposing and merging layers the reader finds in Crow, the stylistic depth out of which great poetry emerges.
Keeping the Faith
If Hughes had been alive to receive the news of his son’s suicide, would he have endorsed the idea of looking at the tragedy in light of Crow? That is essentially an unseemly question. But for devotees of poetry, it’s only natural to fall back on the aesthetic and abstract consolations Hughes never lost faith in.
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