Responsibilities and Other Poems, W.B.Yeats. First Edition, London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. 1916.
You can view our first edition of Responsibilities and Other Poems here.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original decoratively gilt blue cloth designed by Sturge Moore, front and spine lettered in gilt, edges uncut. Housed in a dark blue quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Cover design by T. Sturge Moore Gilt rather dull, notably at the spine. Very good.
First edition, first impression, a canonical presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the month of publication, “Ezra Pound from W. B. Yeats Oct 1916”. Below this on the front free endpaper is Pound’s ownership blindstamp, giving his address at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington W. Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats lived and worked together in close quarters in Sussex over the course of three winters (1913–16). Yeats told his father, “Ezra Pound and his wife are staying with me, we have four rooms of a cottage on the edge of a heath and our back is to the woods.” They collaborated on a number of works, including Yeats’s first volume of autobiography, Reveries, Pound taking dictation from the senior poet and typing the finished product for the printer. The inscription here dates from the last months of their close association: Yeats also presented him a copy of the first English edition of Reveries at the same time.
A collection of Yeats’s poems entitled Responsibilities was first published by the Cuala Press in 1914. This London edition prints those 31 poems and adds The Well and Tree, together with 19 poems from The Green Helmet (Cuala Press, 1910) and two poems from the New York edition of 1912, as well as The Hour-Glass, 1912. Pound had reviewed the shorter Cuala Press edition of Responsibilities admiringly in Poetry March 1914, p. 223. This edition consisted of 1,000 copies.
Responsibilities and Other Poems, W.B.Yeats. First Edition. –
