ELIOT, T.S. Ash Wednesday. London: Faber and Faber 1930.
8vo. Hardcover brown cloth boards with decorative title in gilt and gilt to spine, topedge gilt, pages untrimmed; pp. [12], 21, [3]; spine a little toned; otherwise near fine.
First trade edition, first impression.
Often referred to as his 'Conversion Poem', Ash Wednesday is a long poem written during Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism. Marking the Christian fast day that signifies the beginning of Lent, a day of penitence to acknowledge one's sins, the poem revolves around a narrators hope for salvation in a blasphemous world. Throughout its six parts, the speaker evolves through a series of illuminating and distressing metaphorical transformations some of which find powerful inspiraton from Dante and from texts of liturgy though the poem maintains throughout much of a contrasting, secular undertone. The first section claims the title of an appropriate love poem by Cavalcanti - 'Because I do not hope to turn again'.
This particular early edition of Ash Wednesday is dedicated 'To My Wife'. This dedication to Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, only appears in early editions as they legally seperated in 1933 following a difficult union plagued by mental and physical health issues. Vivienne was later committed to an asylum, where she would die possibly by overdose. Eliot is quoted as saying: 'To her the marriage brought no happiness … to me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land'.
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