SASSOON, Siegfried.

£450 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Tasking. First edition, first impression, limited to 100 numbered copies only; this extranumerary copy is lettered "E" and retains the publisher's glassine. Lettered copies are not mentioned in the colophon or in Keynes's bibliography. Written between 1952 and 1954, these 24 poems show "a greater spiritual awareness and sense of inwardness than any previous volume" (Wilson, p. 383)."Sassoon had hoped to arrange the poems as a sequence, but eventually had to accept that they were 'separate condensations or considerations... merely an exhibition of the spiritual and intellectual shortcomings of a man trying to find things out for himself'" (ibid., p. 384). The book was privately printed with the assistance of noted book designer John Dreyfus, author of A History of the Nonesuch Press (1981).

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