"HOW HARD IT IS TO KEEP FROM BEING KING": SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF HARD TO BE KING, ONE OF ONLY 300 COPIES SIGNED BY ROBERT FROST

FROST, Robert. Hard Not To Be King. New York: House of Books, 1951. Slim octavo, original gilt-stamped blue cloth, original glassine. $1200.

Signed limited first separate edition of Robert Frost's elegant poem on free will, number 186 of only 300 copies signed by him.

First read on May 25 [1951] as the Blashfield Address of the American Academy of Arts and Letters," Frost's Hard Not to Be King was inspired by a story from the Arabian Nights (Thompson and Winnick, 194). Here Frost touches on the subjects of free will, "poetry and free verse… There are also suggestions in the poem of the poet as ruler, the poet as king. After all, Frost, classically educated, knew that Plato banned poets from his utopian state for fear of their strange power. The poem was written in 1950 and first published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters," issued only a few days before this first separate edition (Fagan, Critical Companion, 163). Crane A36.

Cloth with mild toning to spine and board edges; scarce original glassine with wear along spine and flap folds. A very good signed copy.