Inscribed by Eliot for Wyndham Lewis
Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature. Addresses delivered at the City Literary Institute.
London: Oxford University Press Humphrey Milford, 1929.
Price: $8,500.00
About the item
First edition. 1 vols. 8vo. Green cloth. Fine copy without dust jacket. Gallup B11.
Item #369491
Inscribed on the fly title, “For Wyndham Lewis from T.S. Eliot 12.xi.29”
Eliot’s lecture, “Experiment in Criticism”, traces a line from Coleridge and Sainte Beuve to his contemporaries, including I.A. Richard; his essay follows Rebecca West’s “Traditition in Criticism” to close the volume.
A remarkable association copy linking the transplanted American Eliot to the protean, outrageous Wyndham Lewis. Notorious since before the Great War, Lewis had published Eliot in the second issue of Blast, and Eliot had introduced him to Joyce in Paris in 1920. Eliot reviewed The Lion and the Fox in an essay on Shakespeare in 1927. The Apes of God, the magnum opus of Lewis, would be published the following year. For all Eliot’s social conservatism, he was at core of modernist literary experimentation, and had strange companions. As with Pound, Eliot continued to have an entangled history with Lewis: in 1938 the Royal Academy rejected the artist’s portrait of Eliot.
