Description
“FOR MOTHER. FROM TOM. (THE FIRST COPY PUBLISHED)”: FANTASTIC PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION COPY OF T.S. ELIOT’S CHRISTMAS POEM, “JOURNEY OF THE MAGI,” INSCRIBED BY T.S. ELIOT TO HIS MOTHER NINE DAYS BEFORE PUBLICATION
ELIOT, T.S. Journey of the Magi. Drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer. (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927). Small octavo, original yellow paper self-wrappers with illustration in black, original stitching; pp. (4).
Splendid presentation/association first edition—pre-publication copy—of Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi,” inscribed at the end of the poem “for Mother. from Tom. (The first copy published). 16/Aug/1927.” According to Eliot’s bibliographer, Faber & Gwyer published this poem on August 25, 1927, nine days after Eliot inscribed this copy and presented it to his mother.
“After Eliot’s conversion [to the Church of England, in 1927] he placed religion at the center of his life… Eliot’s poetry also now addressed explicitly religious situations. In the late 1920s he published a series of shorter poems in the Faber Ariel series—short pieces issued in pamphlet form within striking modern covers. These included ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928), ‘Animula’ (1929), ‘Marina’ (1930), and ‘Triumphal March’ (1931). Steeped in Eliot’s contemporary study of Dante and Shakespeare’s later work, all meditate on spiritual growth and anticipate the dialogue of self and soul achieved in the longer and more celebrated Ash-Wednesday (1930). ‘Journey of the Magi’ and ‘A Song for Simeon’, exercises in Browningesque dramatic monologues, speak to Eliot’s desire, pronounced since 1922, to exchange the symbolist fluidity of the psychological lyric for a more traditional dramatic form” (ODNB).
Eliot was experiencing writer’s block for some time before he wrote “Journey of the Magi.” “His ‘block’ was not successfully lifted until… Geoffrey Faber asked him to write one in a series of ‘Ariel’ poems—single poems published as illustrated pamphlets for Christmas. It was the first poem written since his student days on an ostensibly religious subject… ‘Journey of the Magi’ is the poem of a convert, which takes as its theme the painful necessity of rebirth” (Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot, 164). In November of 1927, not long after converting to the Church of England, Eliot officially became a British citizen.
Eliot’s mother Charlotte Champe Stearns “was descended from a distinguished New England family; she was a distant cousin of the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. By profession a teacher, she was also an energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis, and an amateur poet with a taste for Ralph Waldo Emerson” (ODNB). “[Eliot] was genuinely devoted to his mother, and continued to write her long letters until her death—’with infinite love,’ he signed one of them in December of 1917. And it was no doubt more than a act of filial piety that prompted him, many years after he had left America, to arrange for the publication of her long poem Savonarola” (Ackroyd, 20). Eliot arranged his mother’s poem for publication and penned the foreword in 1926, the year before he published “Journey of the Magi” and presented this copy to her. Charlotte Eliot died in 1929 at the age of 86. This copy is from the “ordinary” issue of 5000 unnumbered copies; a limited edition of 350 copies was published November 23, 1927. Gallup A9a.
Yellow paper wrappers with expert spine repair, but clean and bright. Eliot’s inscription bold. A wonderful and most desirable pre-publication presentation-association copy.
