Autograph Manuscript Signed and Inscribed, "A Preview for Nita and Doc from R.F., After a good Bread Loaf, 1946," fair copy of 8 poems stitched into a pamphlet.
1946.
Price: $32,500.00
About the item
5 8-1/2 x 11 inch leaves, folded, 16 pp. plus wrappers. 8-1/2 x 6-3/4 inches. Side-stiched, fine, with custom green half-morocco slipcase and matching chemise. Crane A30, E38, E42.
Item #333275
Impeccable fair copies of 8 poems that would be published in Steeple Bush (1947).
1) "To an Ancient"
2) "Something to Hope For": variant title ["Something for Hope" in published book]; line 12 starts "And in" (as in E38), rather than "And with" in book; line 15 has "noxious weed", rather than "wasteful weed" in book; line 17 stars "A cycle of say" (as in E38), rather than "A cycle we'll say" in book; line 21 ends in an exclamation point ("!"), but in a comma (",") in the book
3) "One Step Backward Taken"
4) "Why Wait for Science"
5) "But He Meant It": variant title, first published as such in the Atlantic Monthly (April, 1947) ["The Broken Drought" in book]
6) "The Courage to Be New": has a quatrain, listed here as a postscript, that is cut in the published book No one cavails at their killing / And being killed for speed. / Then why are we unwilling / They should do as much for creed? [The third line appears in E42, the fourth line appears in E38, with punctuation from E42])
7) "A Mood Apart"
8) "Bravado"
Inscribed for Reginald Lansing Cook (1903-1984) and his wife Lydia Juanita Cook. Cook led the Middlebury College department of American Literature, served as director of the Bread Loaf School of English from 1946 to 1964, and wrote Robert Frost: A Living Voice (1974), based on longtime journals of their encounters which he kept from the time of their first encounters in the mid-1920s until Frost's death in 1963.
