Pound, Ezra | One of only 20 signed copies

Pound, Ezra

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. London: The Ovid Press, 1920

8vo (250 x 155 mm). Initials after designs by Edward Wadsworth; one or two stray spots. Original tan linen-backed brown cloth-covered boards, paper label to upper cover; cloth neatly split running length of rear joint, label foxed, minor soiling and fraying.

First edition—one of 200 copies. This 28 of only 20 copies (numbered 16-35) signed by Pound.

For three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”

In the old sense. Wrong from the start—

This is only the third example of one of the 20 signed copies to appear at auction since 1975, with the last copy appearing nearly two decades ago. From a stated total edition of 200, but both Gallup and Ransom note that fewer copies were in fact issued, with a few out-of-series copies and sets of unbound sheets known to exist.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—completed after his departure from Britain—marks a turning point in Pound's poetry. Of this, T.S. Eliot wrote: "What is curious is his complete and isolated superiority as a master of verse form. No one living has practised the art of verse with such austerity and devotion; and no one living has practised it with more success... A man who devises new rhythms is a man who extends and refines our sensibility; and that is not merely a matter of ‘technique’."

Rare.

REFERENCES

Connolly, The Modern Movement 35b; Gallup, Pound (1983) A19