Poems
Selwyn & Blount, 1917.
First edition, one of 525 copies. Original grey paper covered boards with title label to the spine. Frontispiece of the author after a photograph by Duncan Williams. A very good copy.
The author's first regularly published book, issued six months after Thomas was killed in action on the Western Front. (His first was a single volume published under his pseudonym, Edward Eastaway, Six Poems, privately printed by James Guthrie at The Pear Tree Press in 1916.)
PROVENANCE: Ownership signature of H.S. Reid on front endpaper. Hilda Steward Reid, author and poet was described in an article in Time and Tide on leading women writers who had emerged from Oxford after the first world war, Hilda S. Reid was a Somervillian who "was thought much of as a poet by her college, a gentle, dreamy, delicate creature, with fair fluffy hair that would not keep tidy, and a reputation for brilliant and fastidious scholarship that won prizes but could not win alphas in examinations. She forgot lectures, roamed mildly between the Bodleian and Somerville, scattering books; and went down with a fourth in History." Thomas who was also an Oxford History graduate, gaining a second class degree, became famous as a writer of prose until he befriended American poet Robert Frost, who encouraged him to convert his writings into verse.
Stock ID: 34193
Sold
We have sold this item, but similar items
may become available in the future
