SELECTED POEMS LYRICAL AND NARRATIVE.
Yeats, William Butler:
London: Macmillan and Co., 1929. Blue cloth, elaborately stamped in blind, title lettered in gilt, t.e.g., others untrimmed. Portrait vignette on title. Light foxing at edges, a few spots of marginal soiling, cloth a trifle rubbed and faintly soiled, but a very good copy. First edition of this selection. One of 1500 copies. This copy has the errata slip Wade asserts appeared only in some copies, "though not the earliest." Inscribed by Yeats 19 days after formal publication: "Olivia Shakespear from W.B. Yeats Oct 27, 1929." With a further inscription, in the hand of the recipient: "Given to B.C.W. by Ezra Pound Nov 7th 1938." "B.C.W." was B. Cyril Windeler, whose prose work, ELIMUS (1923), appeared in Pound's "Inquest" series published by the Three Mountains Press. ELIMUS was illustrated with twelve designs by Dorothy Shakespear, Olivia's daughter (and Pound's wife). Laid in back are several folded small octavo leaves of manuscript drafts, in ink and pencil, in Windeler's hand, of poems. Yeats met Olivia Shakespear through her cousin, Lionel Johnson, in May 1894. In the double shadows of her troubled marriage to Henry H. Shakespear and Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne, they began a close and enduring friendship that was punctuated by at least one, if not two, periods of genuine intimacy. In 1896, Yeats entered into a year-long affair with Olivia, counted as his first consummated physical relationship. However, Yeats’s ties to Maud Gonne were irrevocable, and resulted in the emotional termination of the affair recorded in “The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love.” Several of the other poems he wrote to her are also collected in THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS. They remained close friends and correspondents nonetheless, and it was Olivia who introduced Yeats to Pound in 1909. After her death in October 1938, Yeats wrote about her in a letter: “For more than forty years she has been the centre of my life in London and during all that time we have never had a quarrel, sadness sometimes but never a difference.” Pound gave away a number of her books to friends when he settled her affairs. WADE 165.
(Item ID: WRCLIT61120) $35,000.00
Inscribed to Olivia Shakespear