19 LITERATURE “A Landmark Volume In Modern American Poetry” 20STEVENS, Wallace. Harmonium. New York, 1923. Octavo, original half blue cloth. $3800 First edition of Wallace Stevens’ first collection of poems, one of only 500 copies in the rare first binding. Although Stevens had been publishing poems in magazines for almost ten years, Harmonium, published when he was 44 years old, was his first collection. Harmonium includes some of Stevens’ most famous poems, such as “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Ploughing on Sunday,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Sunday Morning” and “The Snow Man.” “Harmonium is a landmark volume in modern American poetry… ‘The poet’s subject is his sense of the world,’ Stevens once wrote…he believed in the ultimate value of imagination, in the ability of the imagination to transform reality” (Hamilton, 520). First issue, with red top edge. Without extremely scarce dust jacket. Edelstein A1a-1. Text very clean, gentle toning and slight rubbing to edges of bright boards. An attractive copy in the uncommon first binding. “As I Was, Or Might Have Been”: First Edition Of The Map Of Love, Signed And Twice Inscribed By Dylan Thomas 21THOMAS, Dylan. The Map of Love. Verse and Prose. London, 1939. Octavo, original purple cloth, dust jacket, custom slipcase. $8800 First edition in book form, twice inscribed by Thomas, once beneath the frontispiece portrait by Augustus John: “As I was, or might have been, to Norman Unger from [line pointing at name beneath portrait],” and a second time on the front free endpaper: “ Norman Unger. Dylan Thomas 1950.” Among the works included in this collection of poems and lyrical prose, which had all appeared in periodicals and which here make up Thomas’s third book, are “When all my Five and Country Senses see,” “After the Funeral,” “Not from this Anger,” and “The Mouse and the Woman.” First issue, in fine-grained purple cloth with “Dent” blind-stamped on spine. Maud, 5. Norman Unger, the inscribee of this copy, was one of the great collectors of modern first editions in the mid-20th century; Thomas inscribed a copy of his Twenty-Five Poems “To Norman Unger, my only collector.” Minor soiling to spine of price-clipped dust jacket, otherwise fine. A wonderful inscribed copy.
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