"HE HAS GREAT PROMISE, HE HAS EMOTIONAL POWER, HE HAS MUSIC"

JARRELL, Randall. Blood for a Stranger. New York: Harcourt, Brace, (1942). Slim octavo, original red cloth, original dust jacket. $700.

First edition of Jarrell's first collection of poetry, one of only 1700 copies, a lovely copy in the original dust jacket.

"In the case of Randall Jarrell's Blood for a Stranger there is shown not only sensitivity and talent but that power of working at his art which is one of the signs of a real poet… He has great promise, he has a good sense of form, he has emotional power, he has music, and, unlike many young contemporaries, he is not long-winded… He is worth watching, and what he does is not so brittle, not so much like sculpture in glass, as that of some other modernist poets… It is something to be able to take such an out of the way form as the sestina, which he does in "A Story" and "The Refugees," and fill it with the modern mood and a sort of lost loneliness that is characteristic of our time" (New York Times, November 1, 1942). Wright A1.

Book fine, price-clipped dust jacket bright, clean and near-fine.