THE OCCASIONS OF POETRY: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography.

First edition, first printing. Original brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine. In the Pentagram / John Gorham designed dustwrapper, with Adrian George's drawing of Gunn to the front panel. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt fresh, the contents clean throughout. In the dustwrapper, fine except of a touch of rubbing to the upper outer corner of the front panel. Not price-clipped (£6.95 net to the front flap). A lovely copy.

In the introduction to this valuable collection, Clive Wilmer notes that "[Gunn's] criticism is interesting for what, indirectly, it tells us about his poetry, but it is still more valuable for the way his own experience of writing illuminates what he reads. He is, quite simply, a marvellous "reader" of other men's verse." The volume is divided into two parts under the headings of 'Criticism' and 'Autobiography'. The first includes essays on, among others, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and James Merrill, as well as Gunn's groundbreaking essays on Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson and Thomas Hardy. The essays collected in the second part ('Writing a Poem; 'My Suburban Muse, 'Cambridge in the Fifties' and 'My Life up to Now') form something akin to a mini-autobiography.