First edition. Original blue publisher's cloth decorated (after T. Sturge Moore) in gilt. Author's presentation copy, inscribed by Yeats to Ezra Pound on the front endpaper, "Ezra Pound from WB Yeats Oct 1916", with Pound's blind stamped address beneath the inscription. A very good copy, with the spine gilt dulled and a little wear to the corners.

A monumental association copy. 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, and is particularly apposite as Responsibilities is the collection in which Yeats's poetry moved from the mists of the Celtic twilight and into the harsher light of the Modern movement. Pound, as a sort of secretary, had had a huge shaping influence over Yeats's prosody, pushing him to modernise his voice, indeed he may well be said to be as much the "miglior fabbro" of Yeats's later verse, as he had been with Eliot's Waste Land.
Responsibilities was issued in an edition of 1000 copies and collects the 31 poems from the 1914 Cuala Press edition of the same name with The Well and Tree, 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.

Stock ID: 34983