Secondhand Poetry & Drama Bargain Book Box SP4155

Secondhand Poetry & Drama Bargain Book Box SP4155

Twenty volumes of poetry and plays, with six Shaws and Eliots in the original Penguin and Faber editions, Four Quartets in the Faber boxed edition, Dante’s Paradise, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Burns, Roger Fry’s Poems 1968–1969, Flecker’s Hassan, Spike Milligan’s Small Dreams of a Scorpion, Wendell Berry’s Window Poems, two Australian poets and Kenneth Grahame’s First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows. A reader’s shelf with some scarce things on it.

1. Four Quartets — T.S. Eliot — Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding: Eliot’s last and greatest poem, on time, memory and the fire and the rose. The Faber slipcased hardback with the blue label.
2. Poems 1968–1969 — Roger Fry — A privately printed collection in plain wrappers. Scarce.
3. The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise — Dante — Dante climbs through the spheres of heaven with Beatrice to the vision of God. Dorothy L. Sayers died before finishing it; Barbara Reynolds completed the translation. Penguin Classics.
4. Hassan — James Elroy Flecker — The confectioner of Baghdad, the Caliph, the golden road to Samarkand. Flecker’s verse play, published after his death, with Delius’s music written for it. Hardback with jacket.
5. Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems — ed. Walford Davies — Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, the Refusal to Mourn. The best short selection, with Davies’s notes. Hardback with jacket.
6. First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame — The bedtime stories and letters to his son Alastair that became the book, published by his widow in 1944 with her introduction. Methuen hardback; a collector’s piece.
7. Robert Burns — The Penguin Poets selection: Tam o’ Shanter, To a Mouse, Holy Willie’s Prayer, and the songs. 1946 edition with the blue-grey cover.
8. T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems — Prufrock, Gerontion, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday. The 1948 Penguin, one shilling and sixpence, in the blue poetry stripe.
9. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose — The Windhover, Pied Beauty, the terrible sonnets, and the journals and letters that explain them. Penguin Classics.
10. Three Plays for Puritans — Bernard Shaw — The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Early Shaw, with the preface explaining why he wrote them. Orange Penguin, 1/6.
11. The Cocktail Party — T.S. Eliot — A drawing-room comedy that turns into a play about sainthood and martyrdom halfway through, with the Unidentified Guest who turns out to be a psychiatrist. Faber paper-covered edition, with Alec Guinness on the cover.
12. Major Barbara: A Screen Version — Bernard Shaw — The Salvation Army major, her arms-dealer father, and the question of whose money is clean. Shaw’s own screenplay for the 1941 film with Wendy Hiller. Orange Penguin.
13. Back to Methuselah — Bernard Shaw — Five plays in one, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920, on creative evolution and why people should live three hundred years. Shaw’s most ambitious and least performed. Orange Penguin, 2/-.
14. Window Poems — Wendell Berry — Twenty-seven poems written at a window looking out on the Kentucky River, with wood engravings by Wesley Bates. The Kentucky farmer-poet at his most contemplative. Hardback.
15. Small Dreams of a Scorpion — Spike Milligan — Milligan’s serious poems, on depression, the war, and his children, with his own drawings. The one that surprises people who only know the Goons. Hardback with jacket.
16. New and Selected Poems — Philip Martin — The Melbourne poet’s selection, with the lighthouse cover. Martin taught at Monash and was a Shakespearean; the sonnets are the best of it.
17. Lysistrata of Aristophanes — trans. Dudley Fitts — The women of Athens and Sparta refuse sex until the men stop the war. A rollicking excursion into impropriety, says the cover. Faber paper-covered edition.
18. Winter Driving — Jennifer Strauss — Poems by the Melbourne poet and academic, published by Sisters. Strauss edited Judith Wright; her own poems are quieter and exact.
19. Plays Unpleasant — Bernard Shaw — Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession: the three Shaw wrote to make audiences uncomfortable about slum landlords and prostitution. Orange Penguin, 1/6.