About this Item
This compellingly well-preserved, jacketed first edition, first printing, was signed by Frost in Texas in 1937. Frost wrote in two lines on the front free endpaper recto: "Robert Frost | San Antonio 1937". This copy was signed thus within four months of publication (13 November 1936); Frost spent the winter of 1936-37 in San Antonio, from December 1936 until late March 1937, taking up residence at a home close to Trinity University.Condition is near fine in a near fine 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. Texas provenance for this British-only edition is both a bit ironic and entirely complete; the sole previous ownership mark other than the author s signature is a small bookseller s sticker affixed to the lower left rear pastedown: "FRANK ROSENGREN | BOOKSELLER | MILAM BLDG. | San Antonio, Texas" in operation from 1935 to 1987. Willie Morris, editor of Harper's, called Rosengren's Books "one of the finest and most admirable bookstores in America."The white dust jacket printed in red and black is unclipped, retaining the original lower front flap "5s. net" price, and entirely complete, with no loss or tears. While the jacket shows light overall soiling, we note no appreciable color shift between the covers and spine and only trivial hints of shelf wear to extremities. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.Selected Poems had first been published in 1923, with poems from Frost s first three published collections A Boy s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval. The collection was "carefully calculated to present Frost as a major contemporary figure." Frost s arrival as "a major contemporary figure" had been imminent; that first Selected Poems was published in March 1923, preceding the November 1923 publication of New Hampshire, the collection that won Frost his first Pulitzer Prize. By 1936, when this expanded Selected Poems was published by Jonathan Cape in London, Frost unequivocally was a major contemporary figure. The arrangement of poems 62 rather than the 1923 edition s 43 poems was not only a new and expanded arrangement, but also 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. This expanded edition of Selected Poems 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."Frost required little introduction for the rest of his life. The next year, 1937, he won the third of his eventual and still-unequaled four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He spent his final years as "the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century" with an ever-growing hoard 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). References: Crane A5 & A22; Parini, Robert Frost: A Life; San Antonio Current.
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