God bled, but with man’s blood. Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint Which became gangrenous and stank- A horror beyond redemption. The agony did not diminish. Man could not be man nor God God. The agony Grew. Crow Grinned Crying: “This is my Creation,” Flying the black flag of himself. |source =“Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, 1970}} Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), attracted considerable critical acclaim. In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize, which brought $5,000. His most significant work is perhaps Crow (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse. Crow was edited several times across Hughes' career. Within its opus he created a cosmology of the totemic Crow who was simultaneously God, Nature and Hughes' alter ego. The publication of Crow shaped Hughes' poetic career as distinct from other forms of English Nature Poetry. In a 1971 interview with The London Magazine, Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins, and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves's book The White Goddess, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Hughes worked for 10 years on a prose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film. It tells the story of the vicar of an English village who is carried off by elemental spirits, and replaced in the village by his enantiodromic double, a changeling, fashioned from a log, who nevertheless has the same memories as the original vicar. The double is a force of nature who organises the women of the village into a "love coven" in order that he may father a new messiah. When the male members of the community discover what is going on, they murder him. The epilogue consists of a series of lyrics spoken by the restored priest in praise of a nature goddess, inspired by Robert Graves's White Goddess. It was printed in 1977. Hughes was very interested in the relationship between his poetry and the book arts, and many of his books were produced by notable presses and in collaborative editions with artists, for instance with Leonard Baskin. In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. His Tales from Ovid (1997) contains a selection of