L’inhumanité, l’impertinence et l’improvisation : Crow, poète charognard et poète écorché

Abstract

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.