WODWO

New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1967. First American Edition. 211 x 137 mm. (8 1/4 x 5 1/2"). 184 pp., [1] leaf.
Publisher's blue quarter cloth over brown paper boards, with original (price-clipped) dust jacket. Sagar A12 a.2. Laura Webb, "Wodwo," The Ted Hughes Society, 2021. A very fine copy in a very nearly fine jacket.

Named for the wild man in the Arthurian romance "Gawain and the Green Knight," Ted Hughes' fourth collection of poetry is the first to include prose alongside verse, and introduces his signature style. Hughes (1930-98) had grown fascinated by shamans during the writing of this work, and he conceived of its three-part structure--poems, short stories, and then poems again--as a shamanic journey or adventure, with the poems as the lead-up and aftermath surrounding the prose "event." Despite this mystical framework, literary scholar Laura Webb writes that "in 'Wodwo' we witness the birth of the stark, journalistic style that was to come to full and controversial fruition" in "Crow," especially in the poems "Reveille," "Logos," and "Theology." This particular style and tone enabled "Hughes to embark upon what he perceived as the most creatively potent period of his life." Our first American edition, which followed the English edition by six months, has a few small changes from its predecessor: "Logos" is replaced with "Root, Stem, Leaf;" "Scapegoats and Rabies" was added following "The Green Wolf;" sections II and III of "Gog" were removed; and the titles for the subsidiary poems of "Wings" were taken out..