"BUT I HAVE PROMISES TO KEEP, AND MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP": FIRST EDITION OF SELECTED POEMS, 1928, INSCRIBED BY ROBERT FROST

FROST, Robert. Selected Poems. New York: Henry Holt, (1928). Octavo, original half green cloth and gray paper-covered boards, original light green dust jacket. $2850.

First edition of this expanded selection of Robert Frost's poems, in rare original dust jacket with photo of Frost on the front panel, inscribed "For Katharine M. Denworth from Robert Frost" on the front free endpaper, and with fourteen poems not in the 1923 edition, including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

"The most highly esteemed American poet of the 20th century… [In 1957] T.S. Eliot toasted Frost as 'perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished Anglo-American poet now living,' whose 'kind of local feeling in poetry… can go without universality: the relation of Dante to Florence… of Robert Frost to New England'" (ANB). This expanded selection of Frost's poems includes "Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" among the fourteen poems not included in the 1923 Selected Poems. "First printing" on copyright page. Crane A9. The recipient, Katharine M. Denworth, was the first president of Bradford Academy in Massachusetts, the oldest institution in New England for higher education of women. Dr. Denworth was a graduate of Swarthmore, with a doctorate from Columbia. Her tenure as president of Bradford from 1927 to 1939 oversaw the transformation of the school in 1932 to a liberal arts junior college for women pursuing a bachelor's degree.

Book about fine with only one rear corner slightly bumped. Rare dust jacket in excellent condition, very clean with only a few small edge chips and closed tear to spine. A very desirable inscribed copy in scarce dust jacket.