POUND, Ezra.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Draft of XXX Cantos. First edition, one of 212 copies of the first book of poems that make up Pound's Cantos, his magnum opus.This copy, number 58 of 200 on Canson-Montgolfier soleil velin paper, is from the library of the poet and academic Samuel French Morse (1916-1985), inscribed "Hanover 1934" on the front free endpaper. Morse is best known for his association with Wallace Stevens: Stevens wrote the preface for Morse's first book of poems, Time of Year (1943), while Morse edited several of Stevens's collections, publishing a bibliography in 1954 and a biography in 1970.The Hours Press was owned and operated by Nancy Cunard, the heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune. She first met Pound in 1915, when he approached her mother for support for Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Cunard was able to fulfil an ambition to learn hand-printing when William Bird, proprietor of Three Mountains Press, agreed to sell her his press and types for £300. By late 1928, she had set herself up at Reanville, 50 miles from Paris, intending to publish experimental literature, with an emphasis on poetry: Pound's developing cantos suited her aims perfectly.Writing The Modern Movement in 1965, Cyril Connolly selected XXX Cantos as "the best work in Pound's 'poem of some length'... One enters them like a sunlit church with a service going in a dark corner and suddenly the music pierces... A moment later all is muttering and mumbling."There were also ten signed copies on Texas Mountain paper and two on vell

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