HOMAGE TO CLIO

First UK edition, first printing. Original burgundy cloth lettered and ruled in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean throughout. Some offsetting to endpapers. In the very near fine dustwrapper, a little rubbed to the upper spine tip and corners. Not price-clipped (12s 6d net to the front flap). An unusually bright copy.

'Homage to Clio' was the third of four books published by Auden during the 1950s and 60s which were treated with an unusual degree of hostility by critics (many of whom were poets) who had previously praised (and been influenced by) the poet's earlier work. The title given to Philip Larkin's Spectator review (15 July 1960), 'What's Become of Wystan?', neatly summarises its content ("The appearance of his latest collection [...] marks the end of the third decade of Auden's poetic life and does not alter the fact that almost all we value is still confined to its first ten years"). Similar responses were published by Thom Gunn (Yale Review) and Graham Hough (The Listener). As early as 1941, Randall Jarrell compared what he referred to as the "concrete, startling, and thoroughly realized" qualities of Auden's work of the 20s and 30s with what he deemed to be the "increasingly abstract, public, and prosaic" recent work. It is only in the last three or four decades that the greatness of these middle-period books has become clear. Sean O'Brien (TLS, October 27, 1995) notes how the poet's "later practice seems in many ways quite opposed to his beginnings, as though, travelling through the mirror of art, he had deposed the power to beguile in favour of the obligation to clarify". What was missed by their first readers, bewitched as they were by the cryptic beauty of the early work, are the ways in which the later books, quietly steeped in history and faith (Clio is, of course, the muse of history) manage, by "seek[ing] a degree of effacement for his own commanding presence, [...] to twin vertigo with apparent serenity [...]: time will go on, importantly or not, outside the borders of poetry – though it is in fact Auden who establishes and looks across those borders." The first UK edition of 'Homage to Clio' was published on 8 July, 1960 in an edition of 4000 copies (the US edition was issued three months earlier). (Bloomfield A42b).