Ted Hughes: Truth Kills Everybody

Length / Form 22 lines, free verse

Allusion to Classical figure Proteus

Comment As Crow tries to hold him with his talons, Proteus changes into ‘the famous bulldog Achilles’ (then a shark, mambas, a naked power line). The indices are of strength, menace and power.

Hughes uses the line ‘truth kills everybody’ in his lengthy introduction to and analysis of the Selected Poems of Keith Douglas (1964). (Source: Keegan, Collected Poems, 1256).

This is from a collection of poems called Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow (1970). Accounts of Crow’s genesis seem to vary and its publication history (where omissions, additions and editions pull in several directions) is somewhat sporadic. The Collected Poems  does a fine job of grouping all these disparate elements. With Crow, Hughes creates a modern myth and creature of folklore which interacts with biblical, classical and mythical traditions.  Cut with black humour and violence, the Crow poems are among Hughes’s most striking and instigated a technical reappraisal of his approach to writing poetry.

Further Reading

Stuart Hirschberg. Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes, Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.