BERRYMAN, John.
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING — WITH BEN SHAHN ILLUSTRATIONS, UNCLIPPED. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956.
Octavo. 57 pp, with the poet's notes. "First printing, 1956" stated on the copyright page (LC card 56-6168); published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador Books. Pictorial paper-covered boards designed by Ben Shahn, brick-red cloth spine lettered in gilt, in the matching Shahn-designed dust jacket, $3.75 price intact and unclipped on the front flap. Book very good-plus: the Shahn board design crisp on both panels, light spotting at the head edge, the gilt spine lettering rubbed but fully legible, binding tight and square, internally clean and unmarked. Dust jacket very good — unclipped and intact, the Shahn front-panel design clean.
The book that made Berryman's name. Written over five years between 1948 and 1953 and first published in Partisan Review in 1953 before Farrar, Straus & Cudahy issued it in book form in 1956, the poem is a sustained imagined dialogue with the seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet — a meditation on creative repression, religious doubt, and temptation, set against a close grasp of early American history.
The Ben Shahn collaboration is the second great feature of the first edition. Shahn (1898–1969), the Lithuanian-born American social-realist painter and graphic artist, was at the height of his reputation in 1956. For this book he designed not only the text illustrations but the jacket and the boards — bold black line drawings of a Puritan-era timber house and bare winter trees against a cream ground with a red title panel — so that text and image read as a single composition. Copies with the Shahn pictures intact are collected by Berryman and Shahn enthusiasts alike.
SKU TO-2026-007
