M’Diarmid (MacDiarmid), Hugh ~ Lucky Poet, A Self-Study In Literature And Political Ideas – Being The Autobiography Of Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) : Signed Presentation Copy : With A Signed H/W Letter From The Author
Methuen, London : 1943
The First UK printing published by Methuen in 1943. The BOOK is in Very Good++ condition. A specially bound presentation copy. Spine and corners in shoe leather with gilt decoration and gilt titling to the spine. Marbled covered boards and end papers. The corners and edges are lightly rubbed. Mild pushing at the spine ends. Light marking and toning to the text block. The binding remains tight. The lower corners of the first third of the pages are creased. The binder has written and initialled the following to the lower verso of the front end paper; ' Bound for my friend Bob Adam in the best of shoe leather - may we wear some more out together'. The Book has been Inscribed to the second blank end paper: 'Signed for my friend Bob Adam, with warmest regards and good wishes, from Hugh MacDiarmid'. Below this, the book has been additionally signed by the author's wife at a later date: 'To Bob Adam, with love, Valda Grieve, 20/9/87 (The book is dedicated to Valda Grieve). Accompanied by a loosely inserted signed H/W letter dated 1974, from the author to Bob Adam, informing him of the need to cancel many speaking engagements due to poor health. The author was to die four years later. The book is protected in a loose Mylar cover. 'Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve) was Scotland’s most influential and controversial writer in the 20th century. He urged and enabled the regeneration of all aspects of Scotland’s literature and culture through his poetry, polemical writing and political activity. 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' (1926) is generally regarded as Scotland’s masterpiece of Modernism. 'He started writing in Scots, using words and phrases he knew from boyhood and acquired from reading in dictionaries and works of Scottish literature from earlier eras. The poems of Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926) and A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle (1926) were shocking, adult, wry, rebarbative, difficult, piercingly sweet, unsentimental and brutal. They established a new dispensation for Scottish literature, and modernist lusts: for the body and the sexually explicit cognate with Joyce and Lawrence; for the local and demotic, cognate with William Carlos Williams; for the difficult, cognate with Eliot; for the vatic and austere, cognate with Yeats and Pound; for the intellectually demanding, cognate with Stevens and Valéry; but uniquely in the Scottish context, reclaiming a literary history that had fallen into neglect and obfuscation. Forget about Burns, he advised, go back to Dunbar and Henryson, recover and reclaim a national tradition that goes back through millennia.' (Scottish Poetry Library). Collectible.
BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good++
£425