In Crow, Ted Hughes wants to display the dreadful consequences of the greed and barbarousness of the men of his time. The world he describes is a deserted battlefield and a mass grave in which his crow, as the king of carrion, exults; he is the squalid bard of a massacre, the last and only poet that can exist, whose flowers of rhetoric spread the perfume of all the evil that men have done to each other.
Crow asserts himself as a controversial and unreliable figure because of his impertinence: he is capable of perspicacity when he speaks his caustic mind, disturbing everything men have proclaimed and established; but, at the same time, he remains a foolish and egocentric bird with an empty and shrill voice, that betrays the utter nonsense and meaninglessness of the modern world.
He is the poet-scavenger of the wasteland, whose ars poetica is indeed of a particular kind; he revels in poetic carrion and in exquisite corpses. Still, in his peculiar way, Crow achieves to give meaning to a meaningless universe, to give shape to a destroyed world; up to the point of utter exhaustion when he himself, breathlessly, falls silent and defeated, revealing, under his armour of feathers, the flayed skin of a poetic figure tormented by the intensity of the ordeal.