Description
“HE MIGHT BE OPENING LEAVES OF STONE”: FIRST EDITION OF COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT FROST 1939, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY FROST TO AN OLD FRIEND AND ADMIRER, WITH THE FULL TEXT OF HIS POEM “TRESPASS” IN MANUSCRIPT
FROST, Robert. Collected Poems of Robert Frost 1939. New York: Henry Holt, 1939. Octavo, original gilt-stamped beige cloth, uncut, original dust jacket.
First edition, inscribed “For Cornelius Weygandt” and signed by Robert Frost, with the entire 20-line text of the poem “Trespass” written entirely in Frost’s hand and signed by him on the front free endpaper.
This collection includes all of the poems published in North of Boston, New Hampshire, and A Further Range as well as the selected poems from A Boy’s Will, Mountain Interval and West-running Brook published in the 1930 Collected Poems. Frost’s introduction, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” is published here for the first time. With photographic frontispiece portrait of Frost. Crane A23. This copy is inscribed to Cornelius Weygandt, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was an early admirer of Frost’s work. In 1915, he send him a letter praising North of Blossom and the two met that same year on vacation in New Hampshire, where they became close friends. Frost described Weygandt in the poem “New Hampshire” as the man “Who comes from Philadelphia every year / With a great flock of chickens of rare breeds / He wants to give the educational / Advantages of growing almost wild / Under the watchful eye of hawk and eagle— / Dorkings because they’re spoken of by Chaucer, / Sussex because they’re spoken of by Herrick.” This copy of Frost’s collected poetry bears, in manuscript, the entire text of Frost’s poem “Trespass,” first published a year after this work, albeit with a few alterations, in the literary magazine American Prefaces. Here, it reads: “Trespass / No I had set no prohibiting sign, / And yes my land was hardly fenced; / Nevertheless the land was mine; / I was being trespassed on and against. / Whoever the surly freedom took / Of such an unaccountable stay / Busying by my woods and brook / Gave me a strangely restless day. / He might be opening leaves of stone, / The picture book of the trilobite / For which the region round was known / And in which there was little of property right. / ’Twas not the value I stood to lose / In specimen crab in specimen rock, / But his ignoring what was whose / That made me look again at the clock. / Then came his little acknowledgement; / He came for a drink to the kitchen door, / An errand he may have had to invent / But it made my property mine once more. / Robert Frost / For Cornelius Weygandt.”
Book with mild toning to endpapers, scarce dust jacket with pinpoint foxing to flaps and some edge-wear. An extremely good copy.
