THE COLLECTED POEMS

First edition, first printing. Original tan cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the fine, sharp and fresh dustwrapper. Not price-clipped (£4.50 to the front flap). An unusually attractive copy.

Yvor Winters is an enigmatic figure in twentieth century American poetry. Probably best known as a critic and teacher (the roll call of his students is impressive: Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, Robert Hass among others), his relatively small output of finely wrought poems – their development from early an experimentalism to the deeply informed formalism of the later work – offers the reader an intriguing insight into a very particular sensibility grappling with the diffuse and contrasting currents of modernism and after. At the end of Thom Gunn's moving memoir of Winters, he writes of retaining a "clear picture of him securely in my mind, which I will keep there till the end. Rather than a single memory, it is probably a composite made from a series of memories. We are sitting in his front room or on seats under the trees, drinking wine and talking; he sucks on his pipe during repeated silences; but he speaks at times, measuring what he says—he speaks of poetry with a peculiar intimacy and dedication for the art about which he had more to tell than anyone else I have known." Introduced by the English poet (and Winters's successor at Stanford) Donald Davie, this was the first complete edition of Winters's poems. (Thom Gunn, 'Shelf life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview', London: 1993).