Collaboration
This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is often considered central to the development of the English poetic canon, in his collaboration with the American artist and publisher Leonard Baskin in producing the 1973 book, Cave Birds. The trade volume initially contained over ten of Baskin’s pen-and-ink images (which had inspired Hughes to pen his poems). Why, then, are Baskin’s artworks no longer published alongside Hughes’s poems? This chapter puts drawing and text back into dialogue, offering a sustained intra-artistic reading of an image-poem pair as it resonates with the vision of Michelangelo, Michael Ayrton, Giacometti, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. Artwork and literary text interact before our viewing-reading eyes, performing an eloquent expression of the complexity of aesthetic co-constitution, across media and history.