POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH

First trade edition, first printing. Original purple cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the fine, bright dustwrapper. Light offsetting to endpapers. Not price-clipped (16s / £0.80 net to the publisher's sticker covering the original price). A particularly sharp and attractive copy.

In her preface to this slim, elegant volume, Eliot's widow, Valerie, notes that these early poems were first collected by Eliot's friend, John Hayward (supervised by the author) and privately printed in an edition of just twelve copies by Bonniers of Stockholm in 1950. As "so much interest has been expressed in [the] collection", she explains, "it seems wise to make it generally available as a corrective to [...] inaccurate pirated versions." The poems were written by Eliot between the winter of 1904 and the spring of 1910, between his sixteenth and twenty-second birthdays, while he was a pupil at Smith Academy, St. Louis and an undergraduate at Harvard University. Published 2 May 1967 in an edition of 15,000 copies. (Gallup A56b).