LITERATURE 38 “The Emotion Of Art Is Impersonal”: First Edition Of T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, Signed By Eliot 42 ELIOT, T.S. The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, 1920. Octavo, original navy cloth, dust jacket. $5500 First edition of this collection of critical essays about poetry, including “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” signed Eliot. With 20 essays by T.S. Eliot on poetry-related topics including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dante and Blake. Also included is one of Eliot’s most important prose writings, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” According to G. Douglas Atkins, “Eliot’s essays, unlike Montaigne’s, are observational, attending to what is outside the self. Focusing on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Atkins states that Eliot’s work contains opposites such as past and present, faith and doubt, and holds them together in tension. Moreover, he claims that the essay in general and Eliot’s essays in particular are a species of ‘embodied thought’ and that the form and the content of Eliot’s writing reflect the ‘both/and’ mentality which runs through his work” (Brooker, review in Christianity and Literature). Second state dust jacket, with subtitle on front panel and with “Books by A. Clutton-Brock” on rear panel. Book near-fine, dust jacket with light wear to corners and head of slightly toned spine, very good. Scarce and desirable signed by Eliot. “The New Year Waits, Destiny Waits For The Coming” 43 ELIOT, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral. London, 1935. Octavo, original purple cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $6800 First complete edition of Eliot’s best and most successful play, signed on the title page by T.S. Eliot. Widely regarded as Eliot’s best play—and certainly his most successful—Murder in the Cathedral is his dramatization of the 12th-century murder of Thomas à Becket. Eliot’s plays “are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not apprehended apart from the sense; thus he brought ‘poetic drama’ back to the popular stage” (Britannica). Preceded only by a somewhat abbreviated edition of 750 copies in wrappers “printed for sale at performances of the play in Canterbury Cathedral” in May, one month prior to the present Faber & Faber hardcover edition (Gallup). Foxing to endpapers only, text clean, cloth fresh and fine; dust jacket with shallow wear to ends of slightly toned spine, minor soiling to rear panel, extremely good.
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