{"title":"T.S. Eliot","description":"\u003cp\u003e(1888–1965)\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"eliot-ts-ash-wednesday","title":"ELIOT, T.S. Ash-Wednesday.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eLimited edition signed by Eliot\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e Ash-Wednesday. \u003ci\u003eLondon: The Curwen Press\u003c\/i\u003e. 1930.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original blue cloth with gilt title and gilt lettering on spine, top edge gilt, else untrimmed, housed in original brown paper-covered slipcase; pp. 28; cloth a touch faded, a few tiny spots of discolouration, slipcase slightly rubbed to extremities and beginning to split along the spine; light offsetting to endpapers, otherwise a very good, clean copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition, number 584 of 600 copies, signed by the poet.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Ash-Wednesday” (or “Ash Wednesday”) was written during the period of Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism. Marking the Christian fast day signifying the beginning of Lent, a day of penitence to acknowledge one's sins, the poem revolves around the hope for salvation in a blasphemous world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A15a.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2120217\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56119750033785,"sku":"2120217","price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2120217.jpg?v=1760639173"},{"product_id":"eliot-ts-the-waste-land","title":"ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eEliot handset by Woolf\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e The Waste Land. \u003ci\u003eRichmond: Printed and Published by Leonard \u0026amp; Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press\u003c\/i\u003e. 1923.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original blue marbled paper boards probably by Vanessa Bell, white paper label on front cover printed in black in simplest and least common state, without rules or asterisks, sometime rebacked in blue cloth,  in custom-made cloth fall-down-back box; pp. 35, i [publisher's ads]; a little rubbing to edges, a little occasional light browning, pencil annotations to pp. 6-7, but generally a very good bright copy; ownership signature of Robert Newton to front free endpaper and his occasional pencil annotations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst English edition, of which about 460 copies were printed.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book was handset by \u003cstrong\u003eVirginia Woolf\u003c\/strong\u003e and provided her with her most difficult technical challenge due to the innovative line-spacing of the poem. Eliot was very pleased with the result and considered this edition to be superior to the US edition of 1922 but it caused Virginia some anxiety. She wrote to a friend that \"I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliot's poem with my own hands - you see how my hand trembles\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1921, having taken time off from his job at Lloyds Bank for what would now be called depression, Eliot spent three weeks in Margate, on the South-East coast of England. Sitting in Nayland Rock shelter on the promenade, he wrote “some 50 lines” of \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e, among them direct influence from where he sat: “On Margate Sands…I can connect \/ Nothing with Nothing. \/ The broken fingernails of dirty hands\" (\u003ci\u003eLosasso 2019\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis theme of despair, and its powerful vision of urban alienation spoke to a generation of disillusioned young post-war readers, with some critics hailing it as a masterpiece, and others denouncing it for its allusiveness (the US poet William Carlos Williams disliked the modernist style, claiming in his autobiography that it \"returned us to the classroom\"). Nonetheless, the poem remains one of the most influential of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eProvenance\u003c\/i\u003e: From the library of Robert Newton, author of \u003ci\u003eLeaves of Quest: A fundamental exploration of love in the early poetry of T.S. Eliot\u003c\/i\u003e (1978).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A6c; Woolmer 28.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2121039\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56010397286777,"sku":"2121039","price":15000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2121039.jpg?v=1731593794"},{"product_id":"eliot-ts-knowledge-and-experience-in-the-philosophy-of-fh-bradley","title":"ELIOT, T.S. Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley.","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. \u003ci\u003eLondon: Faber and Faber\u003c\/i\u003e. 1964.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original blue cloth, spine printed in gilt and black, with unclipped dust jacket; pp. 216; very light wear to extremities of jacket, otherwise a very crisp, fine copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition\u003c\/strong\u003e of T.S. Eliot's unpresented doctoral thesis at Harvard on the British philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEliot completed his doctoral dissertation at Harvard in 1916, following years of research both there and at Oxford under the supervision of Bradley's disciple Harold Joachim. While his thesis received praise from Josiah Royce, then head of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy, Eliot never returned to defend it in the \u003ci\u003eviva voce\u003c\/i\u003e examination.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEliot's admiration for Bradley became publicly evident in the notes to \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e, where he quoted the philosopher. The dissertation was eventually published in 1964, with Eliot describing it in the preface as \"only a curiosity of biographical interest\". Nevertheless, the work has since been acknowledged as a significant contribution to the study of the idealist philosopher.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A75.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2121410\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55777193132409,"sku":"2121410","price":300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2121410_702d73ad-3368-4026-958e-80d296e9fc74.jpg?v=1765723829"},{"product_id":"eliot-ts-the-waste-land-2","title":"ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land.","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e The Waste Land. \u003ci\u003eNew York: Boni and Liveright\u003c\/i\u003e. 1922.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original black cloth, gilt-lettered on front cover and spine, all edges untrimmed, with the \u003cstrong\u003eprinted dust jacket\u003c\/strong\u003e; pp. 64; jacket a little rubbed with some tiny loss at tips; otherwise a fine, particularly fresh copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition, first printing, number 57 of 1000 copies.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is probably no poem more iconic of the Modernist movement, twentieth century poetry and recent Western cultural history than \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 \u003ci\u003ePoetry\u003c\/i\u003e 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\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e was initially published in two journals, \u003ci\u003eThe Dial\u003c\/i\u003e in the US and \u003ci\u003eThe Criterion\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a chance to own this landmark of modern culture in the most pristine state imaginable.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A6a\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2121244\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55940861723001,"sku":"2121244","price":100000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2121244_00e84333-696f-45b4-89e5-d553848a9333.jpg?v=1784025926"},{"product_id":"eliot-t-s-the-sacred-wood-essays-on-poetry-and-criticism","title":"ELIOT, T. S. The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eGLENWAY WESCOTT AND MONROE WHEELER'S COPY\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T. S.\u003c\/strong\u003e The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism. \u003ci\u003eLondon: Methuen.\u003c\/i\u003e 1920.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt to the spine and to the front board in blind, lower edge of page block untrimmed; pp. [xiv], 155, [1]; from the library of poet and novelist Glenway Wescott and his partner Monroe Wheeler, their book label affixed to the lower edge of the front pastedown, their light annotations in pencil to handful of pages, small bookseller’s printed description pasted to lower edge of the rear free endpaper, in the second issue jacket, in use from 1921, with added subtitle and a couple of changes to the catalogue printed to the rear panel; minor rubbing to lower spine tip, lightly bumped to corners, cloth and gilt sharp, pages crisp and clean; an uncommonly sharp and bright example, in like dustwrapper.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFirst edition, first impression of the first of Eliot's essay collections, bringing together twenty pieces, including the poet’s most famous and frequently cited essay, \"Tradition and the Individual Talent\", and the great essay on “Hamlet and his Problems”.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA pleasing association copy from the library of poet and novelist Glenway Wescott and his partner Monroe Wheeler, with their elegant ownership label to the front pastedown. Wescott (1901-1987), who occasionally corresponded with Eliot, lived in Germany and France during the 1920s and 30s, and was at the heart of the ex-patriate literary community in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Pound, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein among others. A model for the character Robert Prentiss in Hemingway's \u003ci\u003eThe Sun Also Rises\u003c\/i\u003e, Stein wrote of him, a little disdainfully (in \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas\u003c\/i\u003e [1933]) that \"There was also Glenway Wescott but Glenway Wescott at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour\". His partner for more than six decades,Wheeler (1899-1988) was director of publications at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Sacred Wood\u003c\/i\u003e was the first of a handful of remarkable volumes of literary and cultural essays Eliot published during the 1920s and 30s. Hugh Kenner has written of the young poet’s “incredible fecundity of insight” during these decades, “marshall[ing] into gnomic paragraphs […] that view of the literature of the past which the twentieth century recognizes as peculiarly its own. […] The rays of light are so exactly defined that we are tempted to calculate the position of the sun”.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A5a.; Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: W. H. Allen, 1960).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2122074\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55691250303353,"sku":"2122074","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2122074.jpg?v=1751554454"},{"product_id":"eliot-t-s-the-waste-land","title":"ELIOT, T.S. The Waste Land.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eSigned by the Poet\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e The Waste Land. \u003ci\u003eLondon: Faber and Faber.\u003c\/i\u003e 1961.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSmall folio. Bound by the publisher in vellum-backed marbled boards, ruled in gilt and lettered in gilt to spine, upper edge gilt, else untrimmed, housed in the original matching slipcase (marbled paper-covered boards); pp. 51, [3]; a couple of very small spots to the gutters, slipcase rubbed at edges and expertly reinforced, else fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLimited edition, printed in Dante type by Giovanni Mardersteig on the hand-press of the Officina Bodoni in Verona, this copy no. 65 of just 300 numbered copies printed on Fratelli Magnani hand-made paper and signed by the poet.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1921, having taken time off from his job at Lloyds Bank for what would now be called depression, Eliot spent three weeks in Margate, on the South-East coast of England, where he wrote much of the poem sitting in Nayland Rock shelter on the promenade. The poem’s expression of despair, and powerful vision of urban alienation, spoke to a generation of disillusioned post-war readers, some critics hailing it as a masterpiece, others denouncing it for its allusiveness (William Carlos Williams complained in his autobiography that it “returned us to the classroom”). The poem remains one of the most influential (and greatest) of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A6d.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2120335\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56562498601337,"sku":"2120335","price":7500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2120335.jpg?v=1769506130"},{"product_id":"eliot-t-s-after-strange-gods","title":"ELIOT, T.S. After Strange Gods.","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eThe Degradation of the Modern World\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eELIOT, T.S.\u003c\/strong\u003e After Strange Gods. \u003ci\u003eLondon: Faber and Faber\u003c\/i\u003e. 1934.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the dust-jacket priced 3s. 6d. net to the front flap; pp. 68; spine tips rubbed, cloth a little faded to upper and lower edges, small white mark to upper edge of rear panel, rear panel of wrapper detached (discreetly repaired), significant loss to spine, corners, upper edges, various nicks, closed tears and creasing; a very good copy, in a fragmentary but bright wrapper; signed and dated by Eliot (22 May 1947)to title-page.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA scarce signed first printing of Eliot’s troubled and troubling 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures, a volume withdrawn by the author after a single reprint the same year.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter Strange Gods collects the series of three Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. The jacket text (most likely written by Eliot himself) states that the lectures develop, ‘after fifteen years’ interval, the implications of his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. If that essay, printed in Eliot’s first volume of literary essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), offers a theory of literary tradition and innovation (familiar to generations of English Literature undergraduates to this day), the Virginia lectures ‘were not undertaken as exercises in literary criticism [and] not designed to set forth, even in the most summary form, my opinions of the work of contemporary writers’. Instead, ‘they are concerned with certain ideas in illustration of which I have drawn upon the work of some of the few modern writers whose work I know.’ Nonetheless, in seeking to illustrate his thesis that, as the jacket concisely has it, ‘the weakness of modern literature, indicative of the weakness of the modern world in general, is a religious weakness; […] that all our social problems, including those of literature and criticism, begin and end in the religious problem’, he looks closely at the writings of Hardy, Kipling, Lawrence, and others, in relation to ideas of orthodoxy, and ‘its opposite, heterodoxy, for which I shall also use the term heresy’. For Eliot, Hardy, an atheist (though the word is not used), represents ‘an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs […]’, while Lawrence ‘is for my purposes, an almost perfect example of the heretic.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book was withdrawn by Eliot after just one reprint, in the same year as the first printing, and never reissued. This was primarily owing to a passage on pp. 19-21 advocating ‘unity of religious background’ which is hard not to read as squarely antisemitic (though many have tried). In his short book on Eliot, Stephen Spender (who doesn’t) notes that the period of the lectures ‘was a time of extreme tension for [Eliot], when he was making up his mind to separate from his [first] wife’, and that ‘the unhappiness shows in the lectures.’ He also records Eliot’s assertion ‘that when he wrote After Strange Gods he was in a state of unhappiness which distorted his judgement.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOwing to Eliot’s complex relationship with the book, and the relatively few copies in circulation, signed or inscribed copies have always been scarce.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallup A25a. See Spender, T. S. Eliot (1975); Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e2124307\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sotherans","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57325492437369,"sku":"2124307","price":3000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/files\/2124307.jpg?v=1779607272"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0045\/2178\/7426\/collections\/Eliot.jpg?v=1786702891","url":"https:\/\/sotherans.co.uk\/collections\/t-s-eliot.oembed","provider":"Sotherans","version":"1.0","type":"link"}