Crow
Listed separately from the Collected because Crow demands it. This is the collection that divided British poetry and still hasn't been absorbed. Hughes's crow is creation's mistake, God's embarrassment, the principle of life that persists despite everything. The sequence draws on Native American trickster mythology, Norse cosmology, and an almost Gnostic vision to produce existence as black comedy. No British poet had written anything so bleak or so funny since Milton made Satan.
Hughes abandoned the sequence unfinished, and what exists is one note held very loud: violence, blood, God botching creation, repeat. The anti-style (no music, all croak) is deliberate, which does not make poem after poem of it easier going. Admirers call it cosmology; skeptics call it a man hitting the same black key for ninety pages.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
