Reading word, image, and the body of the book: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Cave Birds

Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux

From Yeats and Pound to Stein and Williams and the writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, fine-printing work, the small press, and the decorated book
fashioned the bibliographical face of the modernist world.
--Jerome McGann (7)

When John Millington Synge declared "All art is collaboration" (vi), he anticipated by some 80 years the arguments such textual scholars as Jerome McGann have been making since the mid-1980s for the collaborative nature of literary production. Synge was thinking about the contributions the peasants he met on the Aran Islands made to his flamboyantly imaginative language; textual critics would add the whole panoply of those involved in all stages of literary production from initial drafts through print or electronic artifact. As recent material readings of modernism suggest, creative partnerships--both visible and not so visible--have especially contributed to the vitality and variety of twentieth-century literature: The Waste Land (Eliot and Pound), Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins), Paul Bunyan (W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten), and Stones (Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers) are only some of the modern examples of the collaborations among writers, artists, composers, editors, publishers, and printers that have challenged what Jack Stillinger aptly calls "the myth of solitary genius." (1)

Such partnerships in the twentieth century often thrived at the small, innovative presses--themselves collaborative affairs--that encouraged and sometimes commissioned collaborations, ventured to publish their results, and created "the bibliographical face of the modernist world." The boom in small-and-fine press printing that began with William Morris's Kelmscott and continues through Hogarth and Cuala to Gehenna, Janus, Arion, Perishable, and Granary has been especially important in creating opportunities for collaborations between writers and visual artists. (2) Deriving from the European modernist tradition of the livre d'artiste as well as from Blake and Morris, the nexus of fine-press printing and verbal-visual collaboration made possible much experimental twentieth-century literature, especially poetry, that sought to cross the perceived boundaries of media. If the twentieth century can be characterized by a "pictorial turn" into our current culture of images, as W. J. T. Mitchell has argued (Picture Theory 11-34), poets participated in it from the start, both in an increasing awareness of the visual body of language itself (from Dada and Pound to Susan Howe) and in collaborative ventures in texts combining words and images. One thinks of such modernist work as the first three volumes of Pound's Cantos with decorated initials and headpieces by Henry Strater, Gladys Hines, and Dorothy Pound; of Laura Riding's The Life of the Dead with John Aldridge; of James Weldon Johnson and Aaron Douglas's God's Trombones; and of such postwar work as Thom Gunn's Positives with photographs by Ander Gunn, Susan Howe and Susan Bee's recent Bed Hangings, and numerous volumes by Robert Creeley including Numbers with Robert Indiana, A Sight with R. B. Kitaj, and Signs with Georg Baselitz. (3)

Though not often placed in the company of such poets as Howe and Creeley, Ted Hughes belongs to this tradition. A poet who produced much of his work for both adults and children in collaboration with visual artists, he frequently published that work with small and fine presses. Throughout his life, Hughes paid particular attention to the textual bodies of his poems, habitually working with such small presses as Gehenna, Bartholomew (at Exeter College of Art), Sceptre, and Janus. Like many of Yeats's works that appeared in limited editions from his sister's Cuala Press before publication by his commercial publisher, in the 1970s many of Hughes's volumes first appeared in limited editions from the Rainbow Press, which he owned with his sister Olwyn. (4) Established in 1971, the press declared its lineage as a modern descendant of Blake's radical experiments in material textuality; Blake's picture of moon, dove, and rainbow (fig. 1) served as its colophon. A money-making venture and an outlet for his own work and that of Plath and others, Rainbow was a collaborative effort. (5) Olwyn often planned the volumes and selected the designs and materials. Hughes took a hand in their production, suggesting the frequently used Bodoni type and the lushly decorated Japanese endpapers in some volumes (Sagar and Tabor 4). Under the imprint of Morrigu Press, his son Nicholas, as a teenager, printed broadsides of his father's poems on the Hugheses' Albion handpress (87-88, 93-94). Rainbow produced elegant, sensuous volumes, often small enough to hold intimately (the large goat-vellum-covered Moortown Elegies is a notable exception), with deeply colored, silky leather bindings stamped simply in silver or gold, contrasting with the heavy, cream-colored, rough Italian paper they favored on the inside. (6)

Hughes demonstrated his keen awareness of the physical aspects of texts and the signifying qualities of language as graphic marks on a page in the introduction to his 1968 selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, where he described her fascicles in language tuned to the particular sensual qualities of the poems, "copied in her headlong, simplified script, and sewn loosely together in little booklets" ("Emily Dickinson" 154). Dickinson's "eccentric dashes," he argued against the then-prevailing practice of regularizing her punctuation, "are an integral part of her method and style, and cannot be translated to commas, semicolons and the rest without deadening the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems." For Hughes, bibliographic normalizing stifled Dickinson's poems, which Hughes understood as having a kind of primitive physical life of their own, naked and electric. He conceived of his own poems as physically alive, akin to the animals he loved to catch as a boy in the Yorkshire countryside. "In a way," he said, "I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal" ("Poetry in the Making" 10).

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Hughes developed his own sense of the animal physicality of his poems less by pursuing radical typographic innovation than by experimenting persistently with the interplay of words and images in the graphic field of the book. Many of Hughes's books from both commercial and private presses contain pictures, mostly of animals and landscapes. Some of the pictures are his own; most are done by others. In "Poetry in the Making," he recalls his pleasure as a child in "modelling and drawing," remembering in particular his satisfaction when he copied animals from a "thick green-backed" book of "glossy photographs" his aunt had given him for his fourth birthday: "I can remember very vividly the excitement with which I used to sit staring at my drawings, and it is a similar thing I feel nowadays with poems" (10-11). Bearing witness to the way the graphic marks of language and of the visual arts flow in and out of each other, some manuscript pages of his poems contain his drawings of animals, often fantastical. That relation is occasionally carried onto the printed page, where text and picture intermix, as in his own illustration in Earth-moon (fig. 2).

From the 1970s on, Hughes frequently collaborated on volumes of poems with visual artists, including photographers Fay Godwin (Remains of Elmet, 1979) and Peter Keen (River, 1983) and, most especially, with American graphic artist and sculptor Leonard Baskin. Hughes met Baskin during the year he and Plath spent in Northampton, Massachusetts (1957-58), where Baskin was a colleague of Plath's at Smith College. They began a lifelong friendship, important to them both. In 1942, as an undergraduate at Yale, Baskin had founded Gehenna Press, which was to become one of the most important fine presses of the century. In Baskin Hughes found a mythic thinker as obsessed with the ways of animals, especially birds, as he was. Baskin's work seemed to Hughes to derive from the written word, to be coextensive with the graphicality of language itself. (7) In his important introduction to The Collected Prints of Leonard Baskin, which he spent the first three months of 1983 writing, Hughes commented that Baskin's "style springs from Hebrew script itself--all those Alephs, Bets, Lameds, Yods, crammed in a basketry of nerves, growing heads, tails, feelers, hair, mouths" ("Hanged Man" 86). The seeds of Crow (1970), the volume that firmly placed Hughes on the map of modern poetry, were sown shortly after Plath's suicide in 1963, when, in an effort to "drive Hughes 'from despair into activity,'" Baskin asked him to write poems on some crow drawings, with the results to be printed at Gehenna. (8) In the troubled, unsettled years following Plath's death, Hughes was able to write little poetry, though he wrote much criticism, including the essay on Dickinson. In 1967 Baskin's drawings and Hughes's recent reading of Eastern European poets became the route back into poetry. They precipitated the major shift in style that enabled Hughes to write out of the tragedy of his life in the laconically cruel poems of Crow. In Baskin's drawings of birds--alert, predatory, intense, with "their tessera-like single-minded devotion to their ways of death" (Leonard Baskin 16)--Hughes clearly found images of his own dark and violent vision. Crow inaugurated a creative partnership with Baskin that lasted for more than 30 years and produced more than 10 collaborations including several children's books, Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama (1978), and Capriccio (1990). (9) Their last project, Howls and Whispers, and illustrated edition of 11 poems on Hughes's relationship with Plath not included in Birthday Letters, appeared the year of Hughes's death (1998). Baskin redesigned Blake for the Rainbow Press's colophon (fig. 3). Hughes's collaboration with Baskin is arguably the most important sustained relationship of Hughes's literary career. The volumes they produced together comprise a sizable proportion of Hughes's work, and an essential part of his achievment as a poet.

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If reading verbal-visual texts is, as Mary Ann Caws suggests, "stressed," it is especially so in the case of Hughes. While many studies speak to the power of images for Hughes and the importance of the collaborations in his life, many others do not mention them, and very few read them as part of the work. (10) As with most verbal-visual texts, there is with Hughes's texts the difficulty of articulating the word and image together or in relation. (How does one keep both arts simultaneously in view? How does one read doubly? Where is an adequate vocabulary?) This is complicated by the uncertain status of the image in a modern book for grown-ups: an illustration is usually understood as an incidental decoration merely. Further, with Hughes, sheer difficulty has kept critics focused on explication. Perhaps most importantly, attitudes toward Hughes's collaborations are curiously bound up in the dissension around his relationship with Plath. Efforts by admirers to defend Hughes against the charge of being an unwelcome collaborator as editor of Plath's Ariel (and as destroyer of her last journal) have often resulted in arguments that uncouple him from other partnerships as well. Leonard Scigaj, one of Hughes's most attentive critics and one sympathetic to his collaborations, voices explicitly the undercurrent in much Hughes criticism: "It would be untrue ... to suggest that Hughes needs commissions [from Baskin], or myth or folklore texts to generate creative ideas ..." (Ted Hughes 13). But Hughes's career suggests a different story. The relationship with Baskin is part of a larger pattern of interart collaborations that constantly fed his work, including that for the theater and cinema with Peter Brook (Seneca's Oedipus [1968], King Lear [1968], and Orghast [1970]) as well as that with Fay Godwin and Peter Keen.

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In what follows, I'd like to look in detail at two textual incarnations of Cave Birds, Hughes's most extensive collaboration with Leonard Baskin, and focus on how we might read the three elements of Hughes's poetic that I've suggested here--words, images, and the body of the book--together in relation. Created in the 1970s, Cave Birds belongs to the controversial period of Hughes's career following Plath's suicide (1963) and the deaths of his lover Assia Wevill and their daughter Shura (1967), when the precise observations of nature that had given his early poems their astonishing vividness gave way to the need to see life and death in large, archetypal narratives in the volumes of his middle period--Crow (1970), Gaudete (1977), and Cave Birds. In her description of Crow, Elaine Feinstein suggests the desperate terms of these poems:

      Under the influence of Baskin, and Central European poets such as
      Janos Pilinszky and Vasko Popa, who understood the brutality of
      experience under totalitarian regimes, Hughes grappled with a
      darkness that few English poets of the time felt any necessity to
      allow into their poetry. His vision is comparable only to
      Beckett's in its bleakness. (160-61)

In its fullest elaboration, Cave Birds is a series of narratively linked poems and black-and-white drawings that tells the tale of a guilty and suffering hero (sometimes cockerel, sometimes crow) who is judged, sentenced, sacrificed, and reborn. The poems are complex and allusive, an inter-weaving of pre-Christian (especially Egyptian) mythology with alchemy, shamanism, Blake, and Jung. Together the poems and pictures chart the hero's quest: after judgment in this world and purgation in the next, the disintegrated parts of the hero's being are, in a Lawrentian vision, united in an exchange with the neglected female and given new life.

In describing how we might read the constituent parts of Cave Birds (the poems, images, and the body of the book), I want to show, first, how these three elements work together to construct the volume's narrative. A multimedia book with a lively, often witty interplay of elements, Cave Birds pursues its argument--this is a didactic book--in several interrelated arenas at once. Reading the poems alone, we miss much of the interest, pleasure, and complexity of Cave Birds. Reading the images and poems in relation also brings into relief Hughes's and Baskin's negotiations with gender, opening them back into the history of gendered discourse about the arts and bringing us face to face with the gynophobic undertow of the volume's insistence on the importance of the female.

Second, I want to suggest that Cave Birds is, in part, about the process of its own making. Both the individual poems and the narrative as a whole self-reflexively comment on words and images, on seeing and saying. When the images and the body of the book are given their due along with the poems, the collaboration itself is displayed page by page and enters the volume's narrative. This has implications not only for how we might read the volume but also for how we might respond to Hughes's mythologizing. Graham Bradshaw expresses what has troubled many readers of Hughes: the possibility that Hughes's synthetic mythmaking is empty, that it is "a tour de force that might cast doubt on the authenticity of the experience the poetry conveys" (237). But if Hughes's quest narrative can seem schematic and overblown in its epic ambitions, the drama of his crisis as a poet and his struggle to understand death, grief, suffering, and guilt in terms larger than himself nonetheless remain compelling. The active presence of the collaboration, once let into our field of reading, helps keep that struggle before us. On a local scale, the collaboration movingly embodies the desire for connection that the mythic narrative envisions.

The collaboration

Cave Birds is, in fact, not one text but several, the result of a complex compositional process. The Cave Birds that most readers encounter is the 1978 Faber & Faber trade edition (published by Viking in New York in 1979 from the same plates), whose narrative I've described above. Its bibliographic face disturbs. Baskin's weird anthropomorphic birds (fig. 4) loom on all but one spread, filling the right-hand page, often threatening with their direct stares and blatant, if sometimes indeterminate, sexuality (fig. 5). On the left, across the gutter, appears a poem, complete on one page. On first approach, it is not clear exactly what this Cave Birds is. Shaped like a children's picture-book, though clearly nothing of the kind, it looks like an illustrated text--poems by Hughes to which Baskin has done pictures--and is talked of as such in the standard bibliography and by early commentators on the work (Sagar and Tabor 67).

Cave Birds, however, involves not only illustration (pictures on poems) but ekphrasis (poems on pictures), a different kind of collaborative relationship with a different history (Loizeaux 91-95). In 1974 Baskin, then living in Devon to be near Hughes, showed Hughes nine bird drawings; Hughes wrote nine poems on them (round A). Baskin then responded with 10 more drawings and Hughes with 10 more poems (round B). Hughes then wrote another 12 poems to which Baskin did 10 illustrations (round C). Cave Birds was composed, in other words, in three stages, two of ekphrasis and one of illustration. (11) But the division between ekphrasis and illustration is not so clear-cut. From the start, Baskin's images came with titles, his own acts of ekphrasis, so that Hughes's poems are both responses to Baskin's images and to his suggestive words about the images. As critics have noted, such titles as A Hercules-in-the-Underworld Bird (associated with the poem "The summoner") and A Tumbled Socratic Cock ("The accused") may well have set the initial direction for Hughes's epic anti-Socratic narrative. The same is true of round B. And round B is further complicated: Baskin's pictures were done in response to Hughes's poems of round A, and so may be viewed as a species of illustration, or at least a visual extension of the verbal narrative those first poems set in motion. The picture of a crow's skeleton encircled by the remaining ribbons of (perhaps) tendons, originally titled The Stone of Death (corresponding with "The knight," discussed below; fig. 6) carries on the enumeration of death's processes begun in such poems from the first round as "The risen." And round C contains poems deeply rooted in both the verbal and visual texts already produced, poems that are ekphrastic as well as illustrated. Poem-and-picture pairs from all three rounds are intermixed in the trade edition's arrangement into a narrative of transformation. As in Anne Sexton's Transformations (illustrated by Barbara Swan) and Charles Simic's Dime Story Alchemy (on the work of Joseph Cornell), Cave Birds' interplay of word and image on the page, and the collaboration behind it, figure that transformation implicitly and explicitly. The transformation of word to image (illustration) and image to word (ekphrasis) enacts the metaphorical alchemy of the volume's subtitle, An Alchemical Cave Drama. (12)

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Like Yeats's, Hughes's oeuvre is notoriously unstable. He frequently revised individual poems after initial publication and even more frequently revised the contents of his poetic volumes. Cave Birds has an especially diverse textual life. Along the way and subsequent to the collaboration, Cave Birds was offered to the public in various forms: a commissioned performance at the 1975 Ilkley Literature Festival, where the poems were read in front of the images projected on a screen; shortly after, a BBC radio broadcast on 26 May 1975 in which Hughes read 30 poems with brief, explanatory comments connecting the narrative; a limited-edition book of the 10 images and poems from round B produced by the Scolar Press for the Ilkley Literature Festival; and the 1978-79 Faber & Faber/Viking trade edition of 29 poems and images. (13) Some of the poems appeared in subsequent editions of Hughes's selected poems, in which the images and claims for their importance gradually leeched from the text. (14) The various incarnations contain various sets of the poems--some with images and some, as in the radio broadcast and selected poems, without--and in various orders. There is much to be said about the give and take as the poems were revised and recontextualized for presentation in different ways for different occasions, especially about the performative aspects of the Ilkley Literature Festival and the BBC broadcast. In terms of the dramatic interplay of word, image, and book, the trade edition and the magnificent Scolar Press limited edition are most suggestive.

The Scolar Press limited edition

Cave Birds was first presented to the world in print in a limited edition of 125 unbound books published by the Scolar Press in 1975. This edition contains only 10 poems, the round B poems, all ekphrastic. With some additions, these poems would form the central section of the trade edition three years later. It begins with the protagonist's death and tells the story of his progression through the tests and purgations of the afterlife and his rebirth into the world. (15) In the otherworld, the cockerel/crow hero is stripped bare, baptized in "winding waters" that dissolve him away "Like a hard-cornered grief, drop by drop" ("The Baptist"); his "soul is skinned, and the soul-skin laid out" ("The Hall of Judgment"); he confesses his guilt to heaven's gatekeeper ("yourself has confessed yourself"). This is not, for the most part, a gentle afterlife, but one, both pictures and poems tell us, inhabited by owls, eagles, and other predatory birds. It is an insistently physical place, bleak and threatening, alternately cold and hot: there are "the mountains of torment and mica," "the Arctic of stone," and "a red wind" and "the black wind, the longest wind / The headwind // To scour you." In "Incomparable Marriage," the hero's neglected, abused female partner--in Baskin's image, a huge eagle facing straight out at the viewer, filling the frame, screeching beak wide--confronts him:

      I meet you.
      For the audit. Your spellbound hours
      Were a summoning. I have come.
      Your creditor--even like water from the rock.

      It is too late to pray. Too late to cry.

In the final poem, full of the imagery of rebirth, "Big terror descends," "A coffin spins on the torque. / Wounds flush with sap, headfull of pollen, / Wet with nectar" and the hero "Blinks at the source." "When everything that can fall has fallen / Something rises," as "The Guide" had earlier predicted.

One encounters this Cave Birds in a portfolio-style book, unbound pages set in a slim brown burlap-covered box secured by two sets of brown twill ties, thus joining the book form and the common carrying case for an artist's works on paper (fig. 7). It is huge (72.5 X 52.5 cm), the size of a kitchen table when open. One has to stand to heft the cover: reading it is a physical experience, in keeping with the volume's insistence on the physicality of all life, even after death. Photographs give little sense of how stunning this book is or what it feels like to read, using both hands, as one must, to lift and set aside page after page. Although the project had not yet acquired its subtitle, with its emphasis on drama (An Alchemical Cave Drama), the book requires one to read with large, theatrical gestures (especially stagey in the setting of the rare-book rooms where most copies are now housed). The images come first, as a group (fig. 8), laid sideways in the volume. They must be lifted out and turned to be looked at, emphasizing their individual nature, their status as works of art separate from the poems. They seem to tease with the possibility of framing: should one want to break up the collection to display them so that they can be easily seen, they are ready. At [pounds sterling]125, well beyond the later trade edition's cost of [pounds sterling]5.95, though not exorbitant, this book is aimed at the collectors' market.

While the order of the contents showcases the images, it also emphasizes the process of collaboration: first Baskin's pictures, then the poems Hughes wrote on them. One peels away all the pictures one by one to reveal the poems beneath, printed on 10 separate sheets, each folded once to make a four-page signature. The unbound folded sheets are enclosed in a folder set into a well in the center of the book's back cover (fig. 9). The poem booklet is one-half the size of a drawing, the size of a large book (35.2 X 50 cm). Each poem, moreover, is accompanied by a copy of a holograph draft of the poem tipped in facing the printed poem on the inside of the folded sheet; some of the drafts, like the one in fig. 10, contain, among the words and in the margins, Hughes's own sketches of fantastical and real animals, suggesting how intimately pictures were involved in the process of these poems' composition and reminding us of the way poems and animals and pictures keep, for Hughes, close company.

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The volume's display of process highlights the very characteristic that makes this object valuable as art: it is the result of the handiwork of two artists. The book authenticates itself as having been made by hand by displaying part of the process of that making. The collaboration displayed thus advertises double value, an artistic twofer. But the book-as-object and the book-as-process also work against each other here: the display of process that produces the book's pieces undermines the idea of the whole, perfectly realized art object on which the art market is based. Word and image are not bound, nor are image and image or word and word. The reading process that the book enforces--standing, lifting the pages out, maybe walking to set them aside on another table--defies in exaggerated ways the "do not touch" dictum of fine-art viewing. And what it produces is not a whole but an assortment of fragments spread out around the reader, the result of reading as disassembling.

The book's tension between product and process may suggest the artist's and the poet's uneasiness with the ideological freight of the limited edition, so at odds with the scrappy, undecorative world of the poems. And one finds evidence that the book resists its own status as art object in other aspects of its bibliographic features as well: the antiart brown burlap cover, for example, whose color and texture underscore the poems' attention to the earthy physicality of the hero's disintegration. Hughes and Baskin try to walk the fine line, as did William Morris, between an art that brings the power of the handmade object into the daily world and the need to recoup the costs (and maybe even make some money on the venture) by selling to collectors. As with most books from fine presses, the tension between the book as work of art and the book as common object, between what you shouldn't touch and what you must touch, between admiring and using, is part of the reading experience itself.

On another level, one can read the construction and arrangement of this Cave Birds as an embodiment of the book's concern with the halting process of decomposition that marks the transition from life into the uncertain state beyond. The volume opens with the cockerel hero's death (figs. 8 and 10) in the collaboration's finest poem, which begins:

      THE KNIGHT

      Has conquered. He has surrendered everything.

      Now he kneels. He is offering up his victory
      And unlacing his steel.

      In front of him are the common wild stones of the earth--
      The first and last altar
      Onto which he lowers his spoils.

      And that is right....

Identifying the cockerel's decaying body with the physical book, the poem shows how "the texts moulder" to reveal "the quaint courtly language / Of wingbones and talons," the language of the body itself. The disintegration of the cockerel's body, as "Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him, / Earth itself unravels him from beneath," suggestively echoes one's own reading of the book as one lifts and spreads out its pieces, sheets of pictures and of poems, disassembling the body of the book until only the case remains.

The texts may "moulder" in the poem, but disintegration does not produce complete decomposition, either in the narrative or the book. "His spine survives its religion," and among the ruins one finds "Here a bone, there a rag," recalling Yeats's "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" where all creation starts, and through that, the nineteenth-century shops that sold rags for the paper used in fine printing. (16) Out of old rags come new books. The detritus of the knight's body contains the material for a new body/book; "In the house of the dead are many cradles," says Hughes's "Loyal Mother." This is the hope Hughes holds out for the knight and also, perhaps, for himself as a poet. For readers of this book, the process of reading as disassembling will inevitably be followed by reassembling, though folding all back into the slipcase cannot be the radical reintegration Hughes has in mind for his hero.

Understanding the relation between word and image in this edition of Cave Birds is a particular challenge precisely because of the volume's fragmentation. But there is a list correlating the titles of the images with the titles of the poems, and its presence suggests that an effort is expected, perhaps even that the correlation of word and image has something to do with the narrative's insistence that the hero discover his relation to his neglected other half.

Throughout the volume, the words, written about the pictures (ekphrasis), establish an ever-shifting relation between the narrative and the images, keeping the reading unsettled, questioning. First-, second-, and third-person voices record the shifting relation and distance between reader, speaker, protagonist, and bird, playing out a drama of identification that implicates all in the passage through death. Sometimes the image is identified as the hero ("The Knight") and described from a safe distance in the third person. Sometimes the image is identified as one of the agents of the otherworld ("The Baptist," "The Gatekeeper"). Sometimes, in an act of prosopopeia, the bird as agent of the otherworld speaks directly to us in the first person, identifying us with the flayed and guilty hero. And sometimes the bird is the hero himself and speaks in lyrical self-expression: "A blot has knocked me down. It clogs me. / A globe of blot, a drop of unbeing" ("The Hall of Judgment"). One might read these shifting relations both as the effort of the poet to keep the ekphrastic project fresh by approaching the image in a variety of ways and as part of the signifying work of the image-text. The constantly shifting distance among its terms suggests the psychological dance as the hero struggles to come to terms with death and embrace the female other. If in ekphrasis, as recent discussions of the poetic genre agree, the word confronts its visual semiotic other (Heffernan; Mitchell, Picture Theory), we might then read Hughes's ekphrasis here as a process that is analogous to that required of the volume's hero. The powerful effect of these shifts in relation cannot be felt in the absence of the images.

The poems and pictures of Cave Birds are, often wittily, interactive. In none of its textual incarnations does Cave Birds attempt a seamless verbal-visual textuality, for all that Blake's composite pages may lie behind the endeavor. Throughout, word and image occupy their own space. What interests Baskin and Hughes is relation across difference: words and images orbit each other, held in active tension, exchanging across the gap.

The poems are playfully aware of themselves as poems on images. "A blot has knocked me down," for example, describes the black oval, interpreted in the poem as an egg, in which Baskin's flayed crow is encased (fig. 11). "Or am I under attention?" he asks, which, of course, he is--from us and from Hughes. Hughes puns on the image: the crow calls what is at the center of the oval/egg "This yoke of afterlife." Light and darkness in the poems are deployed with their conventional associations of knowledge and ignorance but refer, of course, also to the black and white of the drawings. On one level these are, with a few dabs of color here and there, the colors of the afterworld presented in the poems as well, so that chromatically poem and picture together present an image of the afterlife. On another level the poems thematize looking, playing on the convention of sight as a way to knowledge. The necessary preparation for revelation is for the hero, as for other spiritual questers, a stripping bare of the self, until, in Hughes's version, "Nothing remains of the warrior but his weapons // And his gaze." "His eyes darken bolder in their vigil" we're told, "As the chapel crumbles" ("The Knight"). In "The Hall of Judgment," "Darkness," the state in which sight cannot happen, is the condition of "nothingness," the opposite of revelation. The compositional process of the poems themselves begins with looking; ekphrasis takes off from the knowledge attained by observation. While the reader cannot be said to become the quester of the narrative, in the difficult act of reading the limited-edition Cave Birds, he or she lives some of its confused searching.

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The trade edition

If the limited edition emphasizes fragmentation and reading as decomposition, the trade edition, binding word and image face to face in a codex volume, emphasizes reunion. The fullest elaboration of Cave Birds, the 1978-79 trade edition, contains all of the poems and drawings produced, except one each from rounds A and C. The poems and pictures are arranged narratively, not in order of composition. The three rounds are blended, ekphrasis and illustration interspersed throughout the volume, further complicating the shifts in relations suggested in the limited edition. With the exception of the first poem, which is not accompanied by a picture (more on this below), poems and pictures are paired, poem on the left, picture on the right. Bound on the short side, 28.25 cm X 22.5 cm, smaller than a coffee-table picture book but larger than the usual volume of poems, this book is a hybrid like the image-text itself and like the bird-humans of Baskin's drawings.

This Cave Birds, as the new subtitle suggests (An Alchemical Cave Drama), conceives of the volume as a stage. To the cast of characters in the limited edition (the knight, the baptist, etc.) have been added those who participate in the trial that leads up to the protagonist's death in "The knight": the summoner, the interrogator, the judge, the plaintiff, the executioner, and the accused himself. Eleven poems from rounds A and C precede "The knight" and stage a revelation of the hero's guilt and his trial. (17) The poems from the limited edition dramatizing the hero's experiences in the afterlife are slightly reordered and augmented by six interspersed poems from round C. Two poems from round A conclude the volume: "The risen," in which the hero stands before us magnificently reborn as a falcon, and the two-line "Finale," which impishly casts doubt on the hero's triumph: "At the end of the ritual / up comes a goblin." The cast of characters in this Cave Birds, the narrative makes clear, cannot be seen as external to the hero, as they might have been in the limited edition, but must be read as the fragmented parts of his inner psychic life who judge and condemn him to death as well as guide his remaking. This is an interior drama of transformation, a "cave drama."

The ekphrastic poems of round A, which often describe and interpret the image directly (a fact not apparent without the images) provide some of Cave Birds' greatest delights. Here is Hughes's satiric characterization of Baskin's comic plucked bird (originally titled An Oven-Ready Piranha Bird) as representative of Western justice (fig. 12):

      The judge

      The pondering body of the law teeters across
      A web-glistening geometry.

      Lolling, he receives and transmits
      Cosmic equipoise.

      The garbage-sack of everything that is not
      The Absolute onto whose throne he lowers his buttocks.

      Clowning, half-imbecile,
      A Nero of the unalterable. (16)

Hughes's couplets teeter and loll, creating their own "cosmic equipoise" in each end-stopped couplet, comically echoing this grotesque bird's labored steps on the wide-planted, gnarled legs that support his immense body.

In much more obvious and complex ways in the trade edition, autobiographical concern is generalized into an analysis of Western culture and played out in mythological and historical terms. The purging and rebirth of the guilty hero from the limited edition are now set in the larger context of Hughes's cultural critique. The opening poem, "The scream," sets out the problem as manifested in the main character, the cockerel, who has led a life of complacent self-satisfaction:

      Mountains lazed in their smoky camp.
      Worms in the ground were doing a good job.
      Flesh of bronze, stirred with a bronze thirst,
      Like a newborn baby at the breast,
      Slept in the sun's mercy.

      And the inane weights of iron
      That come suddenly crashing into people, out of nowhere,
      Only made me feel brave and creaturely.
      When I saw little rabbits with their heads crushed on roads
      I knew I rode the wheel of the galaxy. (7)

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

Dissociation of sensibility under the pressure of Western abstraction is for Hughes, as for Lawrence, the tragedy of modern man: the rational has suppressed the nonrational human capacities, the mind has gained ascendency over the body, empathy has given way to the exercise of power. "The psychological stupidity, the ineptitude, of the rigidly rationalist outlook--it's a form of hubris, and we're paying the traditional price," Hughes said (Fass 200). The hero of Cave Birds cracks under the strain of his own pride; he is brought up short at the end of the poem, suddenly unable to talk, bereft of the language that had allowed him to rationalize and so evade "the inane weights of iron," life's tragedies. He tries to speak, but "a silence wedged my gullet." He can voice only a primal cry: "The scream / Vomited itself."

As this poem suggests, language, for Hughes, has been the instrument of the rationality that distances feeling and suppresses the physical life of the body. In the anti-Socratic argument, central not only to Cave Birds but to his larger poetic project, "idealistic attempts to isolate abstract conceptual principles" have historically worked by "identifying Good with God as Logos," as Graham Bradshaw succinctly puts it (215). This is a familiar formulation, and throughout Western history it has been routinely accompanied, as scholars have shown (Mitchell, Iconology; Paulson; and Gilman, for example), with a valuation of the image as the word's challenging opposite. In the history of Western discourse about the arts, the image as present, replete, silent, and irrational contends with the logical, symbolic, and "civilizing" discipline of the word. "The history of culture," comments W.J.T. Mitchell, "is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic sign" (Iconology 43). Fear of the power of the image (and what it might make people do) underlies the periodic episodes of iconoclasm that mark Western history (see Freedberg), including, of course, the Reformation, the origin for Hughes of modern dissociation. In their bodiliness, images make men desert rationality in favor of base instinct. The dichotomy is routinely gendered: "Time [language] is a Man Space [image] is a Woman," Blake said (qtd. in Mitchell, Iconology 95), echoing the common cultural notions that lie behind the most influential attempt to delineate the differences between the arts, Gotthold Lessing's 1766 Laocoon. Such thinking is so pervasive that the conventional figuring of the image as female and subversive can be seen in the criticism of Cave Birds itself. Explaining what he finds the uneven quality of the poems in the volume, one critic remarks, "the story, seduced no doubt by Baskin's drawings, seems to lose its way, dissipating the energy" (Sagar, Art 179). "The decorum of the arts at bottom has to do with proper sex roles," explains Mitchell, glossing the underpinnings of Lessing's argument that words and images should stick to their own spheres (Iconology 109).

The terms in which the hero's problems are posed in the trade edition, and the insistent pairing that the layout and binding enforce, ask that we read the general relation of word and image in the context of this larger history of discourse about the arts. Baskin and Hughes pursue their narrative of modern humanity not by overturning the terms of the conventional dichotomies but by calling attention to and using them; the book itself dichotomizes--poems on the left, pictures on the right. Simultaneously, however, the binding and the layout urge the prescribed cure by setting word and image (mind and body, male and female) in relation and challenging us to read the exchange between them. Hughes's desire to join his words to images participates in a common sense among twentieth-century poets that images have an immediate embodied presence that language lacks. In "The scream," Hughes's victim is all words with no image because he is the logical conclusion to centuries of rationalizing language misguidedly valued as the good and powerful, and of the concomitant denigration of the image. The reader turns the page, the trial begins, and there stands Baskin's summoner (fig. 4) on the right, a harsh corrective, "Spectral, gigantified, / Protozoic, blood-eating" (8), looking down on the reader, feathers stiffening into daggers, baroque talons menacing, demanding attention by his sheer physicality to the animal life the hero has criminally disregarded. As he calls the hero to account ("Sooner or later--/ The grip"), the spread dramatizes the confrontation: image as body stands up to mind as word. In this Cave Birds, there is no turning aside from Baskin's often sexually charged, physically confrontational images. They dominate every subsequent spread. Sometimes Baskin manipulates the angle of vision to position us at groin level, staring straight at the genitals of his human birds (figs. 4 and 5), testing response to such blatant displays of the body.

Some of the poem-picture pairs thematize the opposition of thought and body. The image functions as concrete corrective to the hero's verbal rationalizing. When the protagonist gathers himself in the third poem, "After the first fright," from round C--" I sat up and took stock of my options. / I argued my way out of every thought anybody could think" (10)--there is Baskin's bird as the body damaged by such rationalizing (fig. 13). The protagonist's linguistic evasions, full of the capitalized pieties of Enlightenment thought, are met by the illustration's insistence on physical torment as their price, the dismemberment of Baskin's bird.

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

      When I said: "Civilization,"
      He began to chop off his fingers and mourn.

      When I said: "Sanity and again Sanity and above all Sanity,"
      He disembowelled himself with a cross-shaped cut.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

Later in the narrative, in "The gatekeeper," when "remorse, promises, a monkey chatter" (32) blurt "from every orifice" of the hero, the play of word and image in the codex (unlike the limited edition) emphasizes his attempt to talk his way out of death as a last-ditch effort to make rationalizing logos work against the physicality of life insisted on by Baskin's bird (fig. 14).

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

The body's active presence also figures in other aspects of the volume's bibliographic features. Less dramatically than the limited edition, but nevertheless insistently, this book calls attention to its physicality. Awkwardly rectangular, bound on the short side, it flops open in the hands, is difficult to hold, and defies the usual physical balance of a modern open book. Like the spread-winged raptor on the frontispiece, its covers flap wide. The colors (deep cream paper, drawings and type in black ink, bound in black, covered with a paper-bag-brown dust jacket printed in black and blood red) insist on earthiness, as does the thick, matte texture of paper and jacket (fig. 15).

The trade edition develops the narrative of the female other in seven of the added poems, detailing most importantly (in two ekphrastic poems from round A) her roles as the wronged plaintiff and the interrogator who will make the case against the hero. But while the narrative urges union with the female other, Hughes's treatment of the images in these poems lays bare the volume's disturbing gynophobia. Exercising the license given ekphrasis to do what it will with the image, Hughes takes two of Baskin's most threatening images of raptors and genders them female, as he also did with two images from round B that appeared in the limited edition ("A Loyal Mother," "Incomparable Marriage). Probably working off the original title of the image, A Titled Vultress, Hughes describes Baskin's vultress--solidly, implacably black on the page (fig. 16)--as carrying "a dripping bagful of evidence / Under her humped robe" (12). The witty description of her body as "the sun's key-hole" also suggests voyeurism and the vaginal threat that echoes back to "Crow's First Lesson": "And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened" (Crow 20). Hughes's vultress makes clear that there is "Small hope now for the stare-boned mule of man / Lumped on the badlands." The forceful spondees convey the inevitability of her intentions:

      With her prehensile goad of interrogation
      Her eye on the probe

      Her olfactory x-ray
      She ruffles the light that chills the startled eyeball.

Turning the tables on the conventional male gaze, the vultress uses sight (so often the agent of knowledge in this book) with scientific precision to locate and drag up the truth: "Investigation / By grapnel."

In "The plaintiff," Hughes turns Baskin's ambiguously gendered owl--spread out with breast feathers threateningly engorged (fig. 5)--into the protagonist's suppressed other, come to claim her own:

      Her feathers are leaves, the leaves tongues,
      The mouths wounds, the tongues flames

      The feet
      Roots

      Buried in your chest, a humbling weight
      That will not let you breathe.

      Your heart's winged flower
      Come to supplant you. (18)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

The sexual suggestiveness of Baskin's bird is heightened by Hughes into a fantasy of erotic asphyxiation. These poems seem to participate willfully and with sadomasochistic pleasure in the long ekphrastic tradition of fear of the (female) image most vividly played out in Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery," where the gorgon's image exercises such power that she "turns the gazer's spirit into stone."

The narrative of Cave Birds climaxes in "Bride and groom lie hidden for three days," where the flayed and purified protagonist is reassembled in union with the neglected female in a ritual alchemical marriage. In Hughes's poem, the predatory female seems to have melted away, presumably because the hero has accepted her as part of himself, but in Baskin's illustration (fig. 17, a product of round C, in which Baskin illustrated Hughes's poems) her powerful legs and torso and impossibly pneumatic breasts pull against the poem's lyricism. The poem charts a dance of mutual remaking as male and female create each other out of the world's refuse:

      She gives him his eyes, she found them
      Among some rubble, among some beetles

      He gives her her skin
      He just seemed to pull it down out of the air
                                       and lay it over her (56)

In a sexualizing of Yeats's vow to "lie down" in the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart," male creation reciprocates female as "they bring each other to perfection," "gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment." The sparsity of punctuation is as headlong as any of Dickinson's dashes. The visual pattern of urgently overlapping lines expresses the intertwining of their making, repeated in the horizontal reach of the bird man's outstretched leg across the thigh of the bird woman in Baskin's illustration, where their feathers are nearly all stripped away, showing the human features beneath, making explicit the volume's presiding anthropomorphism.

After 55 pages of poems and pictures, it is impossible not to read this climax as also a description of the volume's collaboration, of the mutual bringing to perfection of poet and artist, word and image constituting each other in a book whose binding proves their inextricability. Like other collaborators (Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers in Stones, for example), Hughes and Baskin work self-reflexively. The reassembled body parts ("spine," "plates"), the stitching "with steely purple silk," and the inlaying with "scrolls" play off the art of bookmaking.

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

But Baskin's image makes evident the fact that the task he and Hughes set for themselves was formidable, and there are arguments to be made that the collaboration does not wholly succeed. Elsewhere powerfully responsive to the written word, (18) Baskin, in round C, produced some images that are, as Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts justly observe of "Bride and groom," "inferior" (200). (See also "His legs ran about.") Ironically, the poem that celebrates the mutual creation of man and woman, word and image, inspired the least satisfying image in the volume. Fascination with the hybrid, with the results of unions of difference, can easily shade into the grotesque, as they do here.

And what are we to make of the extent of the mechanical metaphor of "Bride and groom," so at odds, as critics have protested, with the celebration of a reunion with earthy physicality? While the art of the book echoes in the description, bride and groom emerge from their mutual making more like fine machines with "delicate cogs" and "newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled" (56). Such questions about the success of Cave Birds belong to a larger critique of the gap between Hughes's primitivist message and his ability to realize it himself. Graham Bradshaw's thoughtful reservations about Hughes's mythologizing are worth recalling here. He observes that it "can seem primitivistic in worrying ways, when the saving 'primitive' message depends, for its creative advancement, on a highly elaborate and 'intellectual' ideology of romantic retrospection" (237), but he concludes that Hughes was aware of the difficulties and writes that awareness into the self-reflexive closing poem of Cave Birds, "Finale" ("At the end of the ritual/up comes a goblin"). The poem

      reminds us that the problem confronts the poet as well as his
      protagonist; this suggests how Hughes has avoided or at least
      contained the danger of romantic retrospection and sophisticated
      primitivism, by recognising it within his "alchemical cave drama."
      (Bradshaw 237)

We might understand the cogs and coils in similar terms as another recognition within the narrative of the difficulties of recovering the body, specifically that it is hard to escape the methods and products of mechanical rationalism.

The volume's gender dynamics, however, resist such containment within the narrative. Even a sympathetic feminist reader like Nathalie Anderson finds the terms of the mystic marriage unsatisfying. "Perfection," she notes of "Bride and groom," may "feel diminishing to a female reader": "'she' characteristically finds the parts of his body ... while 'he' characteristically devises her parts" (106-07). Rarely in this volume does the main female character exist on her own: always she is understood as his victim and the necessary component of his redemption. Apart from her desire to end the victimization, her need (does she, too, require reunion?) is never an issue. In addition, there is no sense within the narrative that the erotic frisson that the predatory females provide their author (and maybe their reader/viewers) might be a problem.

Although Cave Birds offers evidence that collaboration is not the panacea it is sometimes imagined to be, Hughes's repeated collaborations have the effect, in one aspect of his life, of bringing his mythologizing into the realm of practical activity, of giving it a small but real commitment to the collaboration itself and to the other artist, and of producing a tangible consequence in the collaborative book. Collaboration grounds Hughes's great theme--the integration of damaged, rational man with the other, the recovery of empathy--in a social commitment.

Now is a good time, as Hughes's life and achievements are being reconsidered following his death, to give his collaborative works the thoughtful readings they deserve and to undertake comparative studies placing them in the context of other modern experiments with words, images, and the body of the book. How would Hughes's collaborations appear compared with Creeley's or O'Hara's? Such defamiliarizing would, I think, prove suggestive in understanding and assessing Hughes's achievements by reshaping the field in which we see them. It would also help expand the current, growing effort to write the history of collaboration in twentieth-century poetry not only by adding Hughes to the account but also by demonstrating the extension of collaborative practice beyond avant-garde circles.

I thank the curator, Douglas McElrath, and the staff of the University of Maryland Rare Books Collection, and Steve Eniss of Emory University Special Collections and Archives, for their generous time and help with materials in their collections. I also thank Randall McLeod for his responses to an earlier, shorter version of this essay given as a talk at the Society for Textual Scholarship meeting in 2001 and Catherine Hays for her help with the images.

Drawings by Leonard Baskin reproduced by permission of the Estate of Leonard Baskin. Copyright [c] the Estate of Leonard Baskin. Text from Cave Birds used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright [c] 1978 by Ted Hughes.

Notes

1. See for example Bornstein, Rainey, Dettmar and Watt, and McGann. For studies of literary collaboration in addition to Stillinger, see for example Koestenbaum, Rabate, and Laird.

2. I use the term fine press or fine printing in the broad sense Johanna Drucker describes: "The term 'fine printing' is generally associated with letterpress, handset type, and limited editions, but also can be used to describe carefully produced work in any print medium" (380). Most fine presses are small, but the reverse is not necessarily the case.

3. Most of these books were published only in limited editions. Some, like Positives and God's Trombones, are published only in trade editions. For an account of the rarely discussed collaboration on God's Trombones, see Carroll.

4. Among these volumes are Poems by Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, and Alan Sillitoe (1971); Eat Crow, drawing by Leonard Baskin (1971); Prometheus on His Crag, drawing by Leonard Baskin (1973); Season Songs (1974); Earth-Moon, illustrated by Hughes (1976); Orts, drawing by Leonard Baskin (1978); Moortown Elegies, drawing by Leonard Baskin (1978); Adam and the Sacred Nine, drawing by Leonard Baskin (1979); and Remains of Elmet, photographs by Fay Godwin (1979).

5. Hughes hoped Rainbow could publish Plath's poems "quietly without drawing the attention of a readership he now thought to be hostile" (Feinstein 183). Crossing the Water and Winter Trees (both 1971) turned out to be financial successes, prompting further charges that Hughes was exploiting Plath.

6. Sagar and Tabor note that

      the name of the Press is related to an original plan
      (unfortunately foiled by vagaries in the availability of
      materials) to have each publication bound in a different shade of
      leather, so that the books would form a 'spectrum' across the
      bookshelf. (4)

7. Graphicality is discussed by Morris Eaves.

8. Scigaj, Poetry 144. Sagar suggests the invitation came in 1966 (Laughter xxii), and Feinstein suggests it came in 1967 (160), but Lisa Baskin confirms that 1963 is accurate.

9. The collaborations range from the coupling of their works, as in the numerous books by Hughes that contain a drawing by Baskin, to the more extensive give and take that is usually implied by the term collaboration. In addition to Cave Birds, Capriccio, and Howls and Whispers, these latter include the limited edition of Crow with 12 drawings by Baskin (London: Faber, 1973), Season Songs (New York: Viking, 1975), Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (New York: Viking, 1976), A Primer of Birds (Devon: Gehenna, 1981), Makomaki (Leeds: Eremite, 1985); and Flowers and Insects (London: Faber, 1986).

10. Two studies that do read them as part of the work are Elizabeth Maslen's "Counterpoint" and, itself a collaboration, Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts's Ted Hughes. As Maslen pointed out more than 15 years ago, the "focus on Hughes' own achievements has tended to obscure the fact that collaborations with visual artists have been an integral part of his work for well over twenty years" (33). For example, Alexander Davis's interesting essay on visionary imagination in Hughes never mentions Leonard Baskin or his images in a long discussion of Cave Birds.

11. See Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes 243-44, for an overview of the collaboration. Sagar counts only eight illustrations to the 12 Hughes poems in round C, but there seem to be 10.

12. For a summary and analysis of the volume's alchemical background and quest, see Timothy Materer 141-55. He does not discuss the pictures or the collaboration. Nick Bishop, in exploring the possibility of psychological criticism based not on Jung or Freud but on Sufism and Gurdjieff, notes the relation of the "principle of alchemy" to the "'layered' compositional process" of Cave Birds (178).

13. The Ilkley Literature Festival is especially interesting in terms of the volume's composition. Baskin and Hughes had originally planned an edition of the poems to be published by Baskin's Gehenna Press, but then the Ilkley Literature Festival invited Hughes (for a commission, not an insignificant motive in modern collaborative production) to stage a presentation of the poems. According to Scigaj, Hughes reworked the poems of round B with the performative nature of the occasion in mind (Poetry of Ted Hughes 207). The verbal-visual relation of this version of Cave Birds (dramatic reading with projected images) was conceived within the conventions of the theater's composite art.

In addition to the limited edition of Cave Birds, the Scolar Press also published a broadside (a single folded sheet) of "The Interrogator" with Baskin's drawing and a facsimile of a draft of the poem (Sagar and Tabor 65).

14. In New Selected Poems (1982), selections from Cave Birds appear without accompanying images but with a foreword by Hughes outlining the collaboration with Baskin, briefly describing the missing images, and asserting their importance: "throughout the original sequence the interdependence between drawings and verses is quite close." In subsequent versions, reference to the images gradually shrinks, until in New Selected Poems 1957-1994 there are not only no images but no contextualizing notes of any kind.

15. The 10 poems are, followed by their titles in the trade edition where different: "The Knight," "The Baptist," "The Hall of Judgment" ("A flayed crow in the hall of judgment"), "The Gatekeeper," "A Loyal Mother" ("A green mother"), "Incomparable Marriage" ("A riddle"), "The Culprit" ("The scapegoat"), "The Guide," "Walking Bare," and "The Good Angel" ("The owl flower").

16. See McGann for a reading of the final lines of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" as an allusion to the commerce of the paper industry. Rag and bone shops, he explains, sold rags

      either to stationers or to the great paper merchants, who would
      reprocess them to make paper.... The immediate historical
      allusion is not to papermaking in general, but to printers and
      publishers who used a certain kind of paper (rag paper) and made
      a certain kind of book (fine-press printing). (5)

17. The round A poems are: "The summoner," "The interrogator," "The judge," "The plaintiff," "The executioner," "The accused," "The risen," and "Finale." The round C poems are "The scream," "After the first fright," "She seemed so considerate," "In these fading moments I wanted to say," "First, the doubtful charts of skin," "Something was happening," "Only a little sleep, a little slumber," "As I came, I saw a wood," "After there was nothing there was a woman," "His legs ran about," and "Bride and groom lie hidden for three days."

18. Not only in other collaborations with Hughes but also in his numerous illustrations to other writers including Shakespeare, Euripides, Poe, Blake, Tennyson, and James Baldwin. See Baskin and Franklin.

Works cited

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Baskin, Leonard. Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints. New York: Braziller, 1970.

Baskin, Lisa. Telephone conversation. 12 Aug. 2004.

Baskin, Lisa, and Colin Franklin. The Gehenna Press: The Work of Fifty Years, 1942-1992. Dallas: Gehenna, 1992.

Bishop, Nick. Re-making Poetry: Ted Hughes and a New Critical Psychology. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Bradshaw, Graham. "Creative Mythology in Cave Birds." The Achievement of Ted Hughes. Ed. Keith Sagar. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. 210-38.

Carroll, Anne. "Art, Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages of God's Trombones." College Literature 29.3 (Summer 2002): 57-82.

Caws, Mary Ann. The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Davis, Alexander. "Romanticism, Existentialism, Patriarchy: Hughes and the Visionary Imagination." Sagar, Challenge 70-90.

Dettmar, Kevin, and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

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Eaves, Morris. "Graphicality: Multimedia Fables for 'Textual' Critics." Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. 99-122.

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Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Hughes, Ted. Earth-moon. London: Rainbow, 1976.

______. "Emily Dickinson." 1968. Hughes, Winter Pollen 154-60.

______. "The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly." 1984. Hughes, Winter Pollen 84-102.

______. New Selected Poems. New York: Harper, 1982.

______. New Selected Poems 1957-1994. London: Faber, 1995.

______. "Poetry in the Making: Three Extracts." 1967. Hughes, Winter Pollen 10-24.

______. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Ed. William Scammell. New York: Picador, 1995.

Hughes, Ted, and Leonard Baskin. Cave Birds. Ilkley: Scolar, 1975.

______. Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama. New York: Viking, 1978.

______. Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. London: Faber, 1974.

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Laird, Holly. Women Coauthors. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. "Ekphrasis and Textual Consciousness." Word and Image 15.1 (1999): 76-96.

Maslen, Elizabeth. "Counterpoint: Collaborations between Ted Hughes and Three Visual Artists." Word and Image 2.1 (1986): 33-44.

Materer, Timothy. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult. Ithaca: Cornell, 1995.

McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

______. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Paulson, Ronald. "English Iconoclasm in the Eighteenth Century." Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. Ed. James Heffernan. New York: Lang, 1987. 41-62.

Rabate, Jean-Michel. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.

Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.

______, ed. The Challenge of Ted Hughes. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

______. The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000.

Sagar, Keith, and Stephen Tabor. Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946-1980. London: Mansell, 1983.

Scigaj, Leonard. The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1986.

______. Ted Hughes. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Synge, John Millington. Preface. Playboy of the Western World. London: Maunsel, 1907.

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