Hughes Meets Bacon, Baskin and the Big Screen

Abstract

This chapter considers Hughes’s poetry in relation to the visual arts, focusing in particular on his relationship with Francis Bacon, Leonard Baskin and Pier Paolo Pasolini. John Berger’s concepts on ‘seeing before words’ and on the animal gaze are introduced. Bacon’s obsession with violence and animals provides a useful correlative for Hughes, who expressed a great deal of admiration for the painter. Joining Hughes and Bacon is Gilles Deleuze, whose study of the painter is in many points equally applicable to the poet. The themes raised by this discussion are explored in more detail, as Hughes’s poetry is considered in relation to that of Baskin. This is followed by a consideration of Hughes’s poetic relationship with cinema, drawing comparisons between Gaudete and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concept of cinema, as well as that of Deleuze’s idea of the structure of the cinematic shot.