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This is the first edition, first printing. "Frost's seventh book of poetry was published on 23 April 1942, when the poet was sixty-seven. The book's jacket design showed a beech tree in which a blaze is cut to make it witness to a territorial claim. The first poem in the book - "Beech" - is a sort of epigraph about a 'beech' that gives provisional security in the chaos of the forest. Then follows a section called "One or Two," consisting of fourteen poems, several of which are poems of such passion and lyricism that they astonished the poetry-reading public. There follows a section called "Two or More," which turns largely to social questions. Next is a set of eight poems with the title "Time Out," followed by nine tiny verses called "Quantula." The final section is called "Over Back" and contains six poems on rustic themes. A Witness Tree earned Frost his fourth Pulitzer Prize and a plethora of reviews." (The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, p.413)Condition is very good in a very good minus dust jacket. The blue-green linen cloth binding is square and tight with sharp corners, the spine and gilt mildly dulled, consonant with toning of the jacket spine. The contents are clean with no previous ownership marks. A hint of spotting appears confined to the endpapers. The untrimmed fore and bottom edges are clean, albeit age-toned, the top edges with a little shelf dust. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original "$2.00" upper front flap price, and nearly complete, with fractional loss confined to the spine ends and flap fold corners. The jacket shows modest scuffing to extremities and toning to both the upper rear face and the spine, on which the red author and publisher print is still clear, but the white title print is barely legible. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.Iconic American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963), the quintessential poetic voice of New England, was actually born in San Francisco and first published in England. When Frost was eleven, his newly widowed mother moved east to New Hampshire. There Frost found his poetic voice, infused by New England scenes and sensibilities. Promising as a student and writer, Frost nonetheless dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, teaching and farming to support himself and a young family. A 1912 move to England with his wife and children "the place to be poor and to write poems" finally catalyzed his recognition. There A Boy s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) were published, after which "Frost s reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America." Accolades met his return to America at the end of 1914 and by 1917 a move to Amherst "launched him on the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever "subjects" he pleased at a congenial college… and "barding around," his term for "saying" poems in a conversational performance." (ANB) He eventually won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry - 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943, the last for this book, A Witness Tree. Frost spent the final decade and a half of his life as "the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century" with an accumulating host of academic and civic honors. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).Reference: Crane A23.
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