"THE EMOTION OF ART IS IMPERSONAL": FIRST EDITIONS OF T.S. ELIOT'S THE SACRED WOOD AND COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS, EACH INSCRIBED BY ELIOT

ELIOT, T.S. The Sacred Wood. WITH: Complete Poems and Plays. WITH: Archive of related material. London / New York: Methuen / Harcourt Brace, (1920), (1952). Two volumes. Octavo, original navy cloth, original teal cloth. With an archive of related provenance material. $25,000.

First editions of these two Eliot titles, each inscribed and dated by Eliot for literary scholar William Shelton Gray, Jr.

The Sacred Wood comprises 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). Complete Poems and Plays constitutes the first complete collection of Eliot's poetry and plays. Without scarce dust jackets. Gallup A5a, A60. The recipient of this inscription is literary scholar William Shelton Gray, Jr. Gray first met Eliot when Gray was an undergraduate at Harvard, with Eliot inviting Gray to visit him at his office at Faber & Faber on his next visit to London. Gray went on to write both his master's thesis and his dissertation on Eliot's work: the relationship was sufficiently close for Eliot to proofread Gray's dissertation (titled "The Symbolical Continuity in the Poems of T.S. Eliot"). Gray would continue to visit with Eliot up until a few months before the poet's death in 1965; it was on his last visit with Eliot that Eliot inscribed and dated the present copy of The Sacred Wood.

Included here is an archive of material related to Gray and his relationship—both personal and scholarly—with Eliot. It incudes: related letters to Gray from Eliot's widow Valerie, Pamela Barker (Eliot's secretary), Robert W. Hill (keeper of manuscripts at the New York Public Library), and journalist T.S. Matthews; works by Gray, including copies of his dissertation and master's thesis, and typescripts of essays and articles by Gray on Eliot.

Both of these inscribed volumes were working copies for Dr. Gray, and contain annotations and underlinings; in the Complete Poems and Plays, the annotations are voluminous and fill the entire margin of many pages, including the title page and the rear endpapers.