NEW YEAR LETTER

First UK edition, first printing. Original grey cloth lettered in red to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A little softened to spine tips with a small bump to upper corners. In the dustwrapper, rubbed to extremities, nicked and torn to spine ends (with a little loss), but uncommonly bright. Not price clipped (10s. 6d. net to the front flap). An attractive example.

The second of Auden's books to be published following his move to America in 1939, 'New Year Letter' (published in the US as 'The Double Man') is, as the jacket has it "as difficult to describe as 'The Orators' [1930]." The title poem, an seventy-five page philosophical letter in regular rhyming tetrameter couplets, is followed by an extended commentary keyed to specific lines in the poem drawing upon an extraordinary range of sources, including Chekhov, Henry James, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Rimbaud, Kipling, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Pascal (to name just ten). The book ends with a sequence of twenty sonnets ('The Quest') and an Epilogue. One of the great works of the war years, 'New Year Letter' might be seen as a transatlantic counterpart to that other mid-century philosophical (and Christian) sequence, Eliot's 'Four Quartets'. Published on 29 May, 1941 in an edition of 2000 copies (the US edition had been issued in March). (Bloomfield A24b).