Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.
Hardcover. St Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 62 pages. INSCRIBED/SIGNED BY THE POET on the front fly leaf. The poems discuss a journey across the ocean, a veterans' cemetery, money, an abandoned collection of dolls, and a man who escapes from his prison cell to commit a murder. Clean copy.
Softcover. Trumansburg,NY, self-published, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, yellow wraps, unpaginated. First printing of this early collection of verse by Anderson, also known as a dance critic. Saddle stapled pictorial wraps. A very good copy. Mild toning to wraps' edges. Small name on title page.
Softcover. Lewiston ID, Confluence Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. This chapbook is clean and unmarked in very good condition. Unpaginated. Limited edition of 500 copies.
Softcover. Langley WA, Spring Valley Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 72 pages. One of 1,100 copies. Publisher's leaflet laid in. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st Ltd, 1886, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Illustrated by George Wharton Edwards and F. Hopkinson Smith. SIGNED BY HOLMES, EDWARDS and SMITH on a tipped in leaf stating it's limited to 100 signed copies. 50 pages (3pp). Top edge gilt. Frontispiece portrait of Holmes, 27 full-page illustrations (as called for). Oliver Wendall Holmes was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He is considered one of the finest jurists to have sat on the bench.
Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 837 pages. This volume presents the complete correspondence between two of the most important and influential American poets of the postwar period. The almost 500 letters range widely over the poetry scene and the issues that made the period so lively and productive. But what gives the exchange its special personal and literary resonance is the sense of spiritual affinity and shared conviction about the power of the visionary imagination. Duncan and Levertov explore these matters in rich detail until, under the stress of dealing with the Vietnam War in poetry, they discover deep-seated differences in the religious and ethical convictions underlying their politics and poetic stance. The issues that drew them together and those that drove them apart create a powerful personal drama with far-reaching historical and cultural significance. The editors have provided a critical Introduction, full notes, a chronology, and a glossary of names. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn, chipped dust jacket. This is the first detailed and balanced biography of one of the most controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. It includes much material - poetry, prose, and letters - which has not previously been published. Ezra Pound, an American who left home for Venice and London at the age of twenty-three, was a leading member of "the modern movement," a friend and helper of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and Hemingway, and an early supporter of Lawrence and Frost. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Charlestown MA, Printed and Sold By Samuel Etheridge, Revised Ed., 1810, Book: Very Good, Hardcovers, two volumes complete, 432 and 448 pages. bound in 3/4 calf, with red leather spine labels intact, bindings tight. New corrected edition. A collection of biographical studies on the life of important poets in the cannon of English literature, including: Cowley, Milton, Blackmore, Granville, Somerville, Thomson, Mallet, and Lyttelton. Written by Samuel Johnson, an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. With the original advertisement to the first edition. originally published in 1779-81. Light edgewear to covers, mild water stain to first 4 pages of Vol. 2, otherwise clean, mild foxing, very good set overall.
Hardcover. NY, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly soiled dust jacket with tanning to spine,name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 203 pages. A bold, pioneering, "free-souled" and long-rare classic of concrete poetry published by Doubleday and Company in 1970. One of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page. Clean, bright copy of the paperback edition.
Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 79 pages. The first full flowering of Chinese poetry occurred in the illustrious T'ang Dynasty, and at the beginning of this renaissance stands Meng Hao-jan (689-740 c.e.), esteemed elder to a long line of China's greatest poets. Deeply influenced by Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, Meng was the first to make poetry from the Ch'an insight that deep understanding lies beyond words. The result was a strikingly distilled language that opened new inner depths, non-verbal insights, and outright enigma. This made Meng Hao-jan China's first master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify ancient Chinese poetry. And as a lifelong intimacy with mountains dominates Meng's work, such innovative poetics made him a preeminent figure in the wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition, and that tradition is the very heart of Chinese poetry. This is the first English translation devoted to the work of Meng Hao-jan. Meng's poetic descendents revered the wisdom he cultivated as a mountain recluse, and now we too can witness the sagacity they considered almost indistinguishable from that of rivers and mountains themselves. Clean, bright copy.
Softcover. NY, Grove Press , 1st pbk., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages. Originally published in 1960 by Grove Press, this is a subsequent edition, issued as a paperbound original. Wrappers lightly toned, clean copy.
Softcover. NY , Atheneum, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 141 pages. A Spanish/English bilingual edition of this influential poet. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. NY, Delta, reprint, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 108 pages, selected poetry by the author, 1957-1968. Published as "Writing 20"; original price $1.95 on front wrap; cover photo by Edmund Shea (black-and-white photo of a barefoot woman sitting amid some rubble). Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages. This revised edition of The Poem of Empedocles (1992) integrates substantial new material from a recently discovered papyrus and published by A. Martin and O. Primavesi. The papyrus contains evidence of over seventy lines or part lines of poetry, of which more than fifty are both new and usable. The integration of this material into the previously known fragments has significant impact on our understanding of Empedocles, one of the most influential philosophers and poets of antiquity. Name on front fly leaf otherwise a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 7th pr., 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three uniform volumes in original red slipcase, 1266 pages. Gray cloth covers with black and gilt stamping to titles on spines. Interest in Emily Dickinson has grown throughout the years until, now, in this three-volume edition Thomas Johnson presents the entire body of poems she is known to have written, 1775 in all. Here are the familiar "I never saw a Moor" and "Because I could not stop for Death," along with other less well-known poems, including forty-three never before published. Casual notes to friends and relatives which frequently accompany scraps of verse help to reveal the poet's enigmatic character. After keen analysis of the manuscripts, Johnson has arranged the poems in what is believed to be their chronological order, with variations and rejected versions of each poem following .No dust jackets. Ink notations to about 15 pages in the 3 volumes, Otherwise clean and tight.
Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1891, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt decoration and lettering, 352 pages. Frontispiece portrait of poet, other b&w illustrations. Previous owner's notation on blank prelim page otherwise clean.
Hardcover. London, Macmillan and Co., 1878, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in 3/4 leather over marbled boards, spine with raised bands and ornate gilt design, title in gilt on red leather label. All edges with marble design, marbled endpapers, 625 pages. The Globe Edition of this work. With an introduction by David Masson. Illustrated with a couple of in-text engravings. A collection of the poetry of John Milton, including his best known 'Paradise Lost'.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 165 pages. Examining 20 poets and their poetry of the 1940s with relation to the prose of that period. Clean copy. University of California Publication Vol. 19 No. 3.
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