This is a beautifully fine copy of the first separate edition of the poem whose eponymously titled collection, published in 1923, won Robert Frost his first Pulitzer Prize. This edition was issued in an edition limited to 750 copies, each signed by Frost and numbered. It is a lovely production by The New Dresden Press of New Hampshire, bound in gray-brown paper-covered boards backed with quarter tan crushed linen spine with a gilt printed gray-brown paper spine label and gilt rule transition between the linen and paper-covered boards. The contents are printed in black and red on all rag, mould-made Arches paper and hand-bound with untrimmed fore and bottom edges. The title page wood engraving is by J. J. Lankes and originally appeared in a smaller size as the tailpiece of the 1923 first edition of New Hampshire. The edition was issued in an unprinted dust jacket of semitransparent, rough, white Japanese paper. The publisher also offered an unnumbered and unsigned wraps-bound issue of the edition. 

This is copy “312” so numbered on the limitation statement right below the author’s inscription “Robert Frost”. Condition is truly fine, virtually as-new in a near-fine dust jacket. The binding and contents are immaculately clean and flawlessly bright and fresh. The dust jacket is moderately soiled, most conspicuously to the lower rear face, but almost entirely complete, with only the smallest, fractional loss at the upper front hinge. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.

The lengthy poem “New Hampshire” had not been published before its inclusion in the 1923 collection that shares the poem’s name. Perhaps more than any other poem he wrote, it intentionally establishes New England as Frost’s inspirational, tonal, and literary epicenter.

“More than a place for philosophic contemplations, the New Hampshire of the poem offers a refuge to the speaker… Frost’s New England does not automatically answer hard questions nor does it solve problems; rather it takes situations involving ethically complicated choices and reduces them to their fundamental components.”

When Frost first published “New Hampshire” in 1923, he was not yet a literary icon. 32 years later, when this first separate edition was published, Frost was in the final decade of his life. His still-unrivaled four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry – a streak that began with New Hampshire – were already won, as were myriad academic and civic honors. Frost spent his final years as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century”. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).

References: Crane A6.2; ANB; Tuten and Zubizarreta

Ref #: 008691

 

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