Manuscript book of poetry.

£4,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A fine souvenir of Lawrence’s R.A.F. days. Dunn was an airman and poet who must have served with Lawrence at Mount Batten. He wrote an essay on his friendship with him for T.E. Lawrence by his Friends and it was under Lawrence’s influence that Cape published a book of verse by him called Poems. - Group One in 1934, an inscribed copy, dated “Hendon, 1934” of which is included with this. Both the composition and the presentation as well as the poems’ ultimate publication owe an obvious debt to Lawrence. The ink is as black as Lawrence’s own, the handwriting, with a slight backward slant, is deceptively similar, and the verse itself is in a Housman/ Sassoon vein which must have been sympathetic to Lawrence. The verses are fair copies rather than working manuscripts, though there are some quite substantial pencil corrections, and it seems likely that this was written out for presentation to Lawrence and that Lawrence then forwarded the whole book to Cape to consider for publication. We haven’t been able to find a copy of the published book itself but there is an indication as to what was published in the presence of faint pencil ticks or crosses on each poem. The implication of this is that some of the poems are unpublished, and certainly the manuscript alterations are fairly significant.The poems in the first section, “Early Poems”, are mostly reflective and rural in inspiration, and gradually become more specific, with more direct references to the service life and much machine

• Year: 1933

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