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This jacketed first edition, first printing, is signed by American poet, literary critic, and educator Paul Engle at the head of his introductory essay. On page 23, just below his printed name, Engle signed "Paul Engle" in blue ink. A handsome, folding compliments card laid in features a gilt embossed crown device on the front cover, the inside of the card printed "With all best wishes" and "UNIVERSITY OF IOWA" with Engle s signature "Paul Engle" in between. Also laid in is a franked 1957 postcard posted from New York City featuring a printed announcement: "The Poetry Society of America has the honor of presenting PAUL ENGLE in comments and readings from his published work…" on "Thursday… February 28…". Condition of this signed presentation copy is near fine in a very good dust jacket. The blue cloth binding is square, clean, bright, and tight, with sharp corners and only mild shelf wear to the bottom edges. The contents are clean with no spotting, no soiling, and only mild age toning. The blue-stained top edges retain even color, the fore and untrimmed bottom edges are clean. The sole previous owner markings in the book, in pencil on the upper front pastedown, indicate that the ostensibly original owner paid "$2.00" for this copy on "Nov. 25, 1936" and that it was "Signed Mar. 7, 1957" not long after the 28 February 1957 event advertised on the laid-in postcard.The white dust jacket printed in red and black is unclipped, retaining the original lower front flap "5s. net" price, and substantially complete, with fractional loss confined to the upper joints and upper flap fold corners. The jacket is unfaded, with no color shift between the covers and spine, but lightly soiled overall, with a short closed tear at the upper front flap fold and a three-inch angled tear extending from the upper front joint down along the front face, to the left of the printed title. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.The contributing author who signed, Paul Engle (1908-1991), had intended "to become a Methodist minister" but "decided instead to enter the University of Iowa and obtained an M.A. in 1932. His thesis consisted of an original book of poems, Worn Earth, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize." A sojourn in England followed, via a Rhodes scholarship, and study under the poet Edmund Blunden. This may help explain why Engle is the only American among the four contributors to this work. Engle took a post at the University of Iowa in 1937, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. By the end of his life, he had published more than a dozen books of poetry and "left an enduring mark on the institutionalization of creative writing."Frost s Selected Poems had first been published in 1923, with 43 poems from Frost s first three published collections. This 1936 new and expanded edition, now with 62 poems, was the first book of Frost s to contain material by others, with introductory essays by W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Paul Engle, and Edwin Muir. It was published first and only in England where Frost s first book, A Boy s Will, had been published in 1913, 23 years before. It had been in England that this quintessential American poet had been first published and recognized. Now, preeminent in America, Frost was being reintroduced to England. As explained by the publisher s note on the dust jacket flap: "Mr. Robert Frost is by now recognized as the outstanding poet of his generation in America, and to the few but still too few in England his work has long been known as unique in its kind… it is a striking tribute to the appeal of his poetry that Mr. W. H. Auden, Mr. Cecil Day Lewis, Mr. Paul Engle and Mr. Edwin Muir should have contributed for this volume four specially written essays of critical appreciation, uniting in their admiration of an artist older in years but unageing in his sensibility and performance."References: Crane A5 & A22; ANB; Parini, Robert Frost: A Life.
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