Ted Hughes's Romantic Revisionism in Crow: A Reading with Harold Bloom

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of English Language and Literature, Semnan University

10.22080/jlab.2026.31004.1005

Abstract

Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) represents a radical shift from Ted Hughes’s earlier poetry. It offers a mythopoetic vision of a bleak modern world. This study proposes a new reading of the Crow sequence based on the poetic myth Hughes generates. The literary methodology is based on a Bloomian premise. By employing Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence”, this study focuses on Hughes’s engagement with his Romantic predecessors, particularly Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this connection, by applying Bloom’s concept of “clinamen”, the essay explores how Hughes both inherits and subverts Romantic mythmaking to create a distinctive modern myth of his own. It argues that Crow emerges from an agonistic struggle with Romantic conventions and ideals, functioning simultaneously as an act of paying homage and rebellion against them. This study aims to reveal how Hughes reshapes the Romantic legacy within a modern poetic framework by juxtaposing his Crow sequence with Shelley’s “Alastor” and the metaphor of poet as a solitary nightingale. In doing so, we focus on the narrative quality and internalized quest romance both Hughes and Shelley have developed in their words. In the end, this juxtaposition is extended to explain how Crow (the character) as the poetic persona of Hughes resembles Shelleyan singing nightingale, and how such a shift from a nightingale to a black crow reinforces Bloom’s idea that the whole history of poetry writing consists of strong action and inevitable reaction; a competition between the latecomer poets and their precursors.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Literature Across Borders
Volume 1, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
Winter/Spring
July 2026
Pages 211-226

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