FROST, Robert.

£35,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things", autograph manuscript poem, signed. A rare manuscript copy of one of Frost's most defining poems. The verses, which challenge the Romantic conception of the relationship between nature and humanity, were first published as the final poem in his key collection, New Hampshire (1923). This manuscript is possibly a draft version: a variant ending of the seventh line has been written out and struck through.Frost inscribed this manuscript for his lifelong friend Loring Holmes Dodd (1879-1968). A professor of English and art at Clark University and an early reader of Frost's poetry, Dodd first met Frost after the poet gave a reading at the university on 5 January 1923. He owned copies of Frost's North of Boston and Mountain Interval, into which he inserted a selection of woodcuts by J. J. Lankes, which he felt "fitted the poems as though drawn for them". Dodd showed his copies to Frost, who examined them "with a twinkle in his eye" (Dodd, pp. 234-5). When Frost published New Hampshire later the same year, he commissioned four woodcuts by Lankes to illustrate the volume. Lankes subsequently illustrated Frost's next book, West-Running Brook (1928), and designed the poet's bookplate. It seems Frost gave this manuscript poem to Dodd in gratitude.

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