Doubly repelled, numbed, he has always stood as if battered between the appalling Crow, who eats even God to fill the black bag inside, and Death. He is one of those modernist artists so disgusted with the hypocrisies of civilization that they leap to martyrdom on the truth. He seems to boast that he can swallow more gore and nothingness than anyone else on the block. His pike, otters, tomcats, pigs and dragonflies lend him their appetites, their guiltless desire for more.
Metaphysical absurdity falls on the nests, the sleep-flattened grass, like a chill.
So it is that Hughes rounds to human weakness through the struggle, the hot solace, of the dumb beasts. Crow adds comic stridency to this synthesis, gives Hughes the nucleus for innumerable farcical black situations, opens his poetry philosophically and dramatically. Greedy and indestructible as Crow is, he also incorporates the world-belittled human figures of the early poems, and Hughes treats him with a strained, disgusted compassion. Crow is a figment of genius, as impudently alive as Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner, yet a kind of philosophical kit. It has so much to outshrill, its derisive and despairing stances are so familiar, that it seems more noise than news.