A Book of Yale Review Verse.
Featuring "The Hill Wife" by Robert Frost
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917. First edition. Hardcover. This exceptionally well-preserved little 1917 Yale University anthology is noteworthy for including "The Hill Wife" by Robert Frost at pages 14-17. The lovely binding features quarter faux vellum and light teal paper-covered boards with a gilt printed spine and printed paper label on the front cover. The contents are on heavy wove stock with untrimmed fore and bottom edges. The dust jacket is dark teal printed in black. Condition is near fine in a very good dust jacket. The binding is square, clean, and tight with minimal shelf wear to extremities and just a hint of spine toning. The contents are immaculately clean with a crisp, unread feel and only mild age-toning. We find no previous ownership marks or spotting. The dust jacket is clean and unfaded with only fractional loss confined to the spine ends and corners and clean splits starting at the joints and flap folds. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
"The Hill Wife" was first published in the Yale Review in April 1916, and included in the collection Mountain Interval published later that same year. Frost was newly returned from England, where his first two books, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), had been published, after which “Frost’s reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America.”
Mountain Interval, in which "The Hill Wife" would appear at pages 49-51, was the first of Frost's collections to be published first in America. Frost was at the beginning of the arc that would see him eventually become "the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century" and win a still-to-this-day-unrivalled four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. But all of that lay still ahead when "The Hill Wife" was published in this 1917 anthology. "Critically acclaimed, it is among the best known of Frost's poems. The five-poem sequence that makes up 'The Hill Wife' is, in Louis Untermeyer's words, 'a remarkably founded portrayal of fear and love and loneliness.'"
References: Tuten & Zubizarreta; Crane; ANB. Item #008787
Price: $250.00