New York: Minton, Balch, & Company, 1928.
Price: $3,750.00
Hardcover. First edition, first state, with his poem *Ode to the Confederate Dead* tipped-in. Octavo. Cloth with applied printed label. Housed in a custom cloth clamshell cased with morocco gilt label. Boards very slightly splayed and rubbed, short tear on one leaf, else near fine lacking the dustwrapper. Inscribed by the author to the Cowleys: "For Peggy and Malcolm from Allen. August 14, 1928." He also inserts the word “him” after “distract” in the line reading "Distract from nonentity: his metaphors are dead" on page 31. The author's first solely authored volume of poetry inscribed in the year of publication with a very a significant association. Shortly after Tate began a relationship with his soon-to-be wife Caroline Gordon, they moved to "Robber Rocks," a house in Patterson, New York, with friends Slater and Sue Brown, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. Cowley was one of the few reviewers who understood the seeming contradictions in Tate’s thought and writing, those stemming from his overlapping identities as a Catholic, a Southern Agrarian, and a man of letters. Despite admitting that “it almost seems that his essays are being written by three persons, not in collaboration but in rivalry,” he nonetheless conceded, “I doubt that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate” (quoted in Thomas A. Underwood, *Allen Tate: Orphan of the South*, Princeton UP, 2000; p. 237).
Item #392279
