THE CULTIVATION OF CHRISTMAS TREES. An Ariel Poem.

First edition. Inscribed presentation copy from T. S. Eliot to W. H. Auden. Publisher's original stitched blue paper covers printed in black. One full page colour illustration and smaller calligraphic work at the foot of the poem by David Jones. A very good copy, the binding firm, the covers just a little toned and creased. The contents are clean throughout. Housed in a bespoke dowel spine chemise and slipcase.

Inscribed by the author in black ink on the title page "For Wystan / from / Tom / Christmas 1954". A remarkable association copy, the inscription from one giant of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry to another (the other). Eliot, born in St. Louis, moved to England (via Harvard and Paris) with a scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, in 1914 and soon became the very model of an English man of letters. ("Come to lunch on Sunday", Virginia Woolf wrote to Clive Bell, "Tom is coming […] in a four-piece suit".) Auden, meanwhile, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction. Although they were temperamentally leagues apart, Auden revered Eliot, declaring after the older poet's death in 1965 that "no future changes and fluctuations in taste will consign his work to oblivion"; Eliot admired Auden and clearly knew him to be the greatest poet of his generation ("This fellow is about the best poet I have discovered in several years", he wrote to E. McKnight Kauffer in 1930). Auden was introduced to Eliot's poetry in 1926 by his friend Tom Driberg at Oxford. Soon after buying a copy of Eliot's Poems 1909–1925, he told his tutor Neville Coghill that he had "torn up all my poems [;] I've been reading Eliot. I now see the way I want to write." He soon assimilated the influence and moved on, but his great early poems—as fresh, new and strange as the early Eliot of a decade before—couldn't have been written without the older poet's example. The first manuscript Auden sent to Eliot at Faber and Faber in 1927 was rejected ("I do not feel that any of the enclosed is quite right, but I should be interested to follow your work"), but Paid on Both Sides was published in Eliot's Criterion in 1930 and later the same year Poems, Auden's first full collection, was issued by Faber. T he Cultivation of Christmas Trees, illustrated by David Jones, was the first of eight pamphlets forming the second and final series of seasonal 'Ariel' poems issued by Faber in 1954 (the second was Auden's Mountains, illustrated by Edward Bawden). The first series (comprising thirty-eight pamphlets) was published between 1927 and 1931, Eliot providing five of the poems, one for each year: The Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928), Animula (1929), Marina (1930), and Triumphal March (1931). He clearly didn't rate the later Christmas Poem very highly, inscribing Anne Ridler's copy: "an F. & F. pot boiler—/ the doctrine is better / than the verse. / T. S. Eliot / 1954", it is a characteristically allusive, deceptively informal poem. The final two lines ("Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the f irst coming of the second coming") inevitably bring to mind the world of East Coker (1940), the second of the poet's Four Quartets. Published 26 October 1954, 10,140 copies of the Faber edition were issued on 26 October. T he US edition, with "typography, binding and decorations by Enrico Arno", followed in 1956. (Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography [London, 1981]; The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue [London, 2018]; Gallup A66a).