ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1922.
8vo. Original black cloth, gilt-lettered on front cover and spine, all edges untrimmed, with the printed dust jacket; pp. 64; jacket a little rubbed with some tiny loss at tips; otherwise a fine, particularly fresh copy.
First edition, first printing, number 57 of 1000 copies.
There is probably no poem more iconic of the Modernist movement, twentieth century poetry and recent Western cultural history than The Waste Land. On reading this sublime work, which retains its ability to move, shock and beguile, and deals with such subjects of urgent importance as war, capitalism, spirituality and identity, it is hard to believe that it is now over one hundred years old. Yet it has pervaded our literary culture to such an extent that it is equally difficult to imagine that it once never existed. It has won plaudits from every conceivable source, but Harriet Monroe in the journal Poetry in March 1923 seemed best to express the essence of its achievement: "Mr Eliot’s poem – kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colours that fall somehow into place – gives us the malaise of our time, its agony, its conviction of futility, its wild dance on an ash-heap before a clouded and distorted mirror. … One would expect a certain deliberateness in Mr Eliot’s art, but this poem surprises with an effect of unstudied spontaneity. While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema".
The Waste Land was initially published in two journals, The Dial in the US and The Criterion in the UK, but this is the first standalone edition and the first to include Eliot's famous notes, which enrich, illuminate and sometimes obfuscate the text and become part of the poem itself.
This is a chance to own this landmark of modern culture in the most pristine state imaginable.
Our copy exhibits all three points indicative of the first issue: it is numbered within the first 500 copies, bound in flexible boards, and with stamped numbers in the colophon 5mm high. The text is in the state where the "a" in mountain is missing on page 41. This copy appears to have been issued without the inner piece of unprinted glassine, usually folded underneath the printed jacket.
Gallup A6a
#2121244