Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, Robert Frost's 1935 Christmas Card, one of 450 featuring his Christmas greeting under his name, this copy signed by Frost.
New York: Printed at The Spiral Press, 1935. First edition. Paperback. This original Robert Frost 1935 Christmas Card is the first stand-alone published appearance of this poem. Of 1,235 copies printed for 8 different names, this is one of 450 printed for the poet himself (and his wife, Elinor). And this particular copy is signed, rather charmingly in parentheses, directly below his printed name on the title page "(Robert Frost)".
The binding features “Japanese Kidone paper flush with the leaves and folded over” card beneath, held to the contents by a string binding stitched at the center fold. The contents, printed in black and gold, feature a woodcut of an ocean beach by J. J. Lankes. Condition is very good plus, the binding clean, tight, and sharp cornered, with only the slightest wear to extremities. The contents are clean and bright, spotted only where the Japanese paper flaps made contact with the endpapers.
With the permission of Frost and his publishers, in 1929 The Spiral Press began printing an annual Robert Frost Christmas Card featuring one of his poems. The tradition continued until 1962, Frost's final Christmas. Each annual Christmas poem publication was printed with varying names on the title page to accommodate their being sent by various Frost publishers, artists, and important friends. This copy is one of those printed for Frost himself, the imprint “ELINOR & ROBERT FROST” printed at the foot of the title page.
The 1935 Christmas poem "Neither out Far nor in Deep” first appeared in the Yale Review in 1934 before its first stand-alone publication here, in the 1935 Christmas card, and its subsequent inclusion in the 1936 collection A Further Range. It was reportedly written in California at the time of the 1932 Olympic Games. Poet and literary critic Randall Jarrell asserted that the poem “presents a notion common to Frost’s poetry: ‘a recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or palliation.’ …Although Frost’s watchers on the beach have a restricted access to truth or insight they seek and ‘cannot look out far’ nor ‘in deep’ when they gaze at the sea, they still keep the watch.” The poem has been used as an example of Frost’s darker portrayals of an unknowable, ambivalent universe, but it has been suggested that this misses the sense of irony and playfulness that often leavens Frost’s bleaker facets.
In 1935, when he inscribed and sent this Christmas poem, Robert Frost (1874-1963) was still ascending to the dizzying literary heights that would let him spend his final years as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with an accumulating hoard of academic and civic honors. The feat, remarkable in itself, is all the more remarkable considering that Frost did not publish his first volume of poetry until he was nearly 40 years old. By Christmas 1935, Frost had already won two of to-this-day-still-unrivalled four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943). In 1937 he would win his third for A Further Range, the first collection in which this poem was published.
References: Crane B19; Tuten and Zubizarreta; ANB. Item #008729
Price: $750.00