First US edition
ELIOT, T.S. Poems 1909-1925. New York and Chicago: Harcourt Brace. [1925].
8vo. Original cloth and scarce second issue dustwrapper; pp. 128; very slight chipping to top edge of wrapper, near fine.
First US edition.
This seminal collection includes all the key early works of T.S. Eliot, including Prufrock (1917), Poems (1920), The Waste Land (1922), and The Hollow Men (1925) which appears complete here for the first time. The Hollow Men is divided into five parts and concludes with the famous reiteration of lines "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper". An obituary for Eliot in The New York Times stated that the last four lines of the poem are "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".
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