Come In and Other Poems, inscribed and signed by Robert Frost in the year of publication.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1943. First edition. Hardcover. This is a lovely, jacketed first edition, first printing inscribed in the year of publication. On the half title in three lines in blue ink Frost wrote: “Robert Frost | 1943 | For Rees J. Frescoln”.
A handsome Second World War production, this book features an oatmeal linen cloth binding illustrated and printed in dark red with full-color illustrated endpapers, illustrations throughout, red topstain, and a handsomely illustrated dust jacket. “Selection, biographical introduction and commentary” are credited to Frost’s great friend, fellow poet, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977). "The poems in this volume... have been chosen out of all his seven volumes, from A BOY'S WILL to A WITNESS TREE; as a group, the more than eighty poems include his most famous and popular work... Louis Untermeyer's commentary... is a notable addition to the poems themselves... The biographical introduction... presents the most complete and up-to-date account of the poet..." Black and white wood-engraved illustrations throughout, as well as the watercolor endpapers of New Hampshire’s Mount Kearsarge and the frontispiece watercolor of birch trees, are by John O’Hara Cosgrave II. An enlargement of this volume with additional material by Louis Untermeyer was published by Holt with the title The Road Not Taken in 1951.
Condition approaches near fine in a near fine dust jacket. The illustrated cloth binding is square, tight, and unfaded, with minimal shelf wear, including lightly bruised upper corners, and a few faint instances of spotting. The contents are clean, with no spotting or soiling and only mild age-toning. The red topstain retains uniform hue. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original “$2.50” upper front flap price, and entirely complete, with no loss or tears. The jacket is lightly toned overall, slightly more so to the spine, and shows only trivial hints of wear to the extremities. The jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
This collection’s titular poem, “Come In”, was first printed in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1941 and collected in A Witness Tree (1942). Arguably archetypally Frostian, in the poem “a speaker journeys out into nature to register a typically ambiguous sign from an encounter there. In ‘Come In” the journey is significantly only to the edge of the darkening woods – no further… At his public readings, Frost would use ‘Come In’ to declare his objections to the grimness of modernist wasteland verse, occasionally suggesting that this poem might express his rejection of invitations to gatherings of modern poets.” This is the final poem in the collection, preceding the Afterword and paired, rather beautifully, with “Into My Own” which precedes “Come In” and faces it on the preceding page, verso to recto.
This collection was published on 5 April 1943. Frost was nearly 70 years old. The next month, in early May 1943, came announcement of Frost’s final and still-unrivalled fourth Pulitzer Prize for poetry (for A Witness Tree). Even though he had not published his first volume of poetry until he was nearly 40 years old, he would spend his remaining two decades as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with an accumulating hoard of academic and civic honors. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).
References: Crane A26; Tuten & Zubizarreta; ANB. Item #008724
Price: $1,000.00