CUALA PRESS: YEATS, William Butler.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Synge and the Ireland of his Time. First edition, first impression of 350 copies, of this memoir of John Millington Synge (1871-1909). W. B. Yeats intended his essay to be published as an introduction to Maunsel's collected edition of Synge's work (1910) but withdrew it as he considered some of the work included in their selection to be unworthy of Synge's reputation. Yeats, a long-term collaborator of Synge's at the Abbey Theatre, described him in the preface to Synge's posthumous collection Poems and Translations (1909) as "a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book's momentary cries: all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone: and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting, and coming up to judgement". Synge's premature death, age 37, on 24 March 1909 "affected Yeats profoundly" (DIB).The Cuala Press was one half of Cuala Industries, a co-operative business run by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats. Cuala Industries was founded with the aim of reviving the craft of book printing in Ireland and "to give work to Irish girls" (McMurtrie, p. 472).This copy is from the library of Louis Claude Purser (1854-1932), the brother of the artist Sarah Purser. A fellow classics student with Oscar Wilde at school, Purser was appointed professor of Latin at Trinity College,

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