MEREDITH, William.
Archive of the First Three Books, Each Inscribed, with an Autograph Poem, Letters, and Manuscript Material.
An archive bringing together inscribed copies of all three early books — one of them a limited first edition — with an autograph poem, letters to a single named recipient, and manuscript journal leaves is uncommon: a coherent association archive documenting both the published arc and the working hand behind it. Small octavos and accompanying material. Minor wear to the dust jackets, one price-clipped; otherwise fine.
The three volumes: Love Letter from an Impossible Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), the Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by Archibald MacLeish, here the second printing; Ships and Other Figures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), first edition, inscribed at Los Angeles in 1953; and The Open Sea and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), the limited first edition, one of 1,000 copies printed from type and designed by Harry Ford. Each volume is inscribed by the poet.
Together with: a full-page autograph poem, "To Absent Friends," signed and dated May 1954; an inscribed postcard bearing the complete poem "A Sensible Snowfall on Two Japanese Maples in Connecticut," dated Christmas 1958; a substantial typed letter signed; an autograph letter signed; and two leaves from a Colorado River journal. Also included: Reasons for Poetry & The Reason for Criticism (Washington: Library of Congress, 1982), the published text of Meredith's two lectures as Consultant in Poetry.
SKU TO-2026-088
