Mr Cogito Tells Crow about Spinoza but Crow Goes on Laughing: “Civilization” and “Barbarism” in Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr Cogito and Ted Hughes’s Crow

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) and Ted Hughes (1930-1998) are not often compared in critical studies, though—as Terry Gifford claims—Herbert was one of several Eastern European poets who influenced Hughes’s work. In this paper, I refer to Hughes’s remarks on Eastern European poetry and present the possible reasons for Hughes’s admiration of Herbert at the end of 1960s. I wish to present Herbert’s and Hughes’s poetry as introducing certain new qualities into post-war European poetry. However, the main aim of my work is to juxtapose the protagonists of Herbert’s and Hughes’s collections, Mr Cogito (Pan Cogito, 1974) and Crow (1970), thus initiating a kind of dialogue between the “civilized” figure of Herbert’s Mr Cogito and the “barbaric” figure of Hughes’s Crow. I examine how “civilization” (especially Christian civilization) is perceived through the lenses of two contemporary poets – one from the West and the other from the East.