T.S. After Strange Gods.

by ELIOT

£3,000 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

ELIOT, T.S. After Strange Gods. London: Faber and Faber . 1934. 8vo. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the dust-jacket priced 3s. 6d. net to the front flap; pp. 68; spine tips rubbed, cloth a little faded to upper and lower edges, small white mark to upper edge of rear panel, rear panel of wrapper detached (discreetly repaired), significant loss to spine, corners, upper edges, various nicks, closed tears and creasing; a very good copy, in a fragmentary but bright wrapper; signed and dated by Eliot (22 May 1947)to title-page. A scarce signed first printing of Eliot’s troubled and troubling 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures, a volume withdrawn by the author after a single reprint the same year. After Strange Gods collects the series of three Page-Barbour Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. The jacket text (most likely written by Eliot himself) states that the lectures develop, ‘after fifteen years’ interval, the implications of his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. If that essay, printed in Eliot’s first volume of literary essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), offers a theory of literary tradition and innovation (familiar to generations of English Literature undergraduates to this day), the Virginia lectures ‘were not undertaken as exercises in literary criticism [and] not designed to set forth, even in the most summary form, my opinions of the work of contemporary writers’. Instead, ‘they are concerned with certain ideas in illustration of

• Binding: Hardcover

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