The Arts Anthology: Dartmouth Verse 1925, poet Carl Sandburg's copy, inscribed to him in January 1926.
Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1925. First, limited, and numbered edition. Hardcover. This first edition 1925 collection of Dartmouth Verse connects two great American poets of the twentieth century - Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. This is Sandburg's personal copy, inscribed and gifted to him. The inscription is inked in seven lines on the front free endpaper: "To | Carl Sandburg | January 14, 1926 | Hanover New Hampshire | Gail Borden | for | 'The Arts'". The person who inscribed this copy to Sandburg, Gail Borden, was at the time a Dartmouth undergraduate, class of 1926, who went on to become a journalist, drama critic, and columnist with the Chicago Daily Times, and during the Second World War served in the Army Air Corps.
This anthology is noteworthy for a Foreword (dated "June, 1925") and Introduction by Robert Frost found at pages V-IX. Frost explains in his Foreword that this volume results from a Dartmouth undergraduate contest in which "more than sixty undergraduates submitted over two hundred manuscripts, many of them of such quality that competent members of the faculty and of the writing profession hailed them as worthy of publication." The book was produced for subscribers in a limited and numbered edition of "FIVE HUNDRED COPIES... PRINTED ON VAN GELDER PAPER BY THE MOSHER PRESS PORTLAND MAINE FOR THE ARTS HANOVER NEW HAMPSHIRE AND THE TYPE DISTRIBUTED IN THE MONTH OF MAY MDCCCCXV". It is a handsome, if fragile, production, a small hardcover featuring a quarter ivory paper-covered spine with blue-gray paper-covered boards, the spine printed in black and red. The contents are printed on laid paper and bound with untrimmed fore and bottom edges. Per the colophon, this copy is hand-numbered "422". Condition is very good. The binding is square, tight, and sharp-cornered, though mildly soiled with some shelf wear to extremities. The contents are beautifully clean and bright.
Frost's Introduction is characteristically folksy, pithy, and mischievous, and merits the book on its own. It begins: "No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet's germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than of a waterspout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can't be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he ever lived outside of books..." Indicative of Frost's intimate and often conflicted and contentious relationship with institutions of higher education is his following comment about the emerging poet, necessarily "between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five" struggling to "strike his individual note" which must be struck then "or never." Of such emerging poets, Frost says: "School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past... I for one should be in favor of the colleges setting the expectation of poetry forward a few years (the way the clocks are set forward in May), so as to get the young poets started earlier in the morning before the freshness dries off. Just setting the expectation of poetry forward might be all that was needed to give us our proportioned number of poets to Congressmen. R.F." Item #008786
Price: $350.00