COLLECTED POEMS 1951-1971 - INSCRIBED BY HAROLD BLOOM TO FRED C. ROBINSON
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972. First Edition. Item #8583
First Printing. Octavo (22cm); tan cloth, with titles stamped in copper on spine; dustjacket; xx,396pp. Inscribed on the upper half-title page by American literary critic and professor Harold Bloom to Fred C. Robinson, his colleague at Yale: "For Fred Robinson / with affection + respect / Harold Bloom." Touch of softening to crown, minor crimping to cloth at heel, else a clean, Near Fine copy. Dustjacket is unclipped (priced $12.50), spine-sunned and lightly edgeworn, with a few tiny tears, and some faint foxing along the upper edge on verso; Very Good+.
A distinguished copy of this substantial collection of poems, which won Ammons the first of his two National Book Awards for Poetry in 1973. In Bloom, who was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, and arguably the most famous literary critic of the 20th century, Ammons had both a friend and an advocate. On the front flap copy for this volume, Bloom is cited extensively: "The critic Harold Bloom has suggested that Ammons is in the great central line of American poets – from Emerson through Whitman, Frost, Pound, Stevens, and Williams – who have written a specifically American poetry, concerned to compound the visionary and the visible. Bloom says, "It will seem increasingly to many attentive readers that this volume – the most distinguished book of American verse, in my judgment, since the publication of Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems in 1955 – marks the permanent establishment of a major visionary poet. As we learned to read Stevens in the '50's and '60's, we will learn to read Ammons in the '70's and '80's." A tremendous endorsement, and a warm inscription from Bloom to Robinson (1930-2016), widely considered among the foremost authorities on Old English, who joined the Yale faculty the year this collection was published, and where he retired as professor emeritus. 8583.
Price: $500.00