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THE BOOK OF NEW POEMS, 1943, edited by Oscar Williams, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, probable first edition, illustrated with photos of some of the poets, 1943. BOOK CONDITION: good. The text block and illustrations are in near fine condition with no dogears, tears, or marks. There is no book plate nor signature of prior owner. The editor (Oscar Williams) and his wife (poet Gene Derwood) have signed the first free endpaper; Derwood also inscribed, ?In memory of Gordon Barker with best wishes.? The pages are age-toned. Not a remainder or library book. The gray cloth boards are in good condition (bumped spine, discolored areas). The dust jacket is in fair condition (chipping and crinkling of top and bottom edge, tears at spine top and bottom and elsewhere, age-toned inside and out). 8 ¼ x 5 ½, 325 pages, 18 ounces XX Some of the poets contained in this anthology are Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, e e Cummings, Gene Derwood, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwarz, Karl Shapiro, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Mark Van Doren, Oscar Williams, Ivor Winters. [from the inner flaps] The finest new work of America's and Britain's finest poets appears in this unique anthology. Because all the poems Mr. Oscar Williams has chosen deal with realities, the book is essentially one of war poetry, not of propaganda, literary or otherwise. As "It is the work of poets the editor says, who have intensely felt the fact of war . They write not of the movement of troops, the horror of the enemy or the mechanism of the tank, but of the state of the human organism in the emotion of now living." The writers in this book are not limited to "young promising poets" or merely established poets, or any particular clique. It is a rounded selection of the work produced by all the important schools of modern verse concerned with present-day realities. [About the editor] Oscar Kaplan (December 29, 1900 ? October 10, 1964), known by his pen name Oscar Williams, was an American anthologist and poet. Williams was born Oscar Kaplan in Letychiv, Ukraine, son of Jewish parents. He emigrated to New York at the age of seven. His first book, Golden Darkness, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Among his influential anthologies are Master Poems of the English Language, Immortal Poems of the English Language, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, and the Little Treasury Poetry Series, which were used in colleges and high schools around the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. Gene Derwood (1909?1954), was an American poet, painter and wife of the poet and anthologist Oscar Williams.
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