The Waste Land, inscribed - photo 1
The Waste Land, inscribed - photo 2

The Waste Land, inscribed

Lot 214
28.01.2025 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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CHRISTIE'S
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1360931
Lot 214 | The Waste Land, inscribed
Estimate value
$ 60 000 – 90 000
ELIOT, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965). The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.

A rare, signed presentation copy of the first edition of Eliot's modernist masterpiece. "Inscribed to John Cournos by T.S. Eliot, 24.ii.33."

On 24 February 1933, the date of Eliot's inscription, he delivered a lecture in Sprague Memorial Hall at Yale University titled “English Poets as Letter Writers,” which Cournos presumably attended while he was with Eliot in New Haven. Cournos, a Jewish Russian-born American writer, began his career as an Imagist poet in Britain before emigrating to the United States where he worked as a journalist for the Philadelphia Record. A member of H.D.’s circle, his unhappy love affair with Dorothy Sayers in the early 1920s was fictionalized in her novel Strong Poison. Cournos has docketed this volume in the month of publication: “John Cournos to himself N.Y. Dec 1922.” A ticket on the rear endpaper for New York’s Gotham Book Mart (with their first, 47th Street address) suggests this is where he purchased his copy.

1922 was undoubtedly the annus mirabilis of the Modernist period, seeing the publication of e.e. cummings's The Enormous Room, Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, Gertrude Stein's Geography and Plays, W.B. Yeats's Later Poems and the two undisputed masterpieces of the era, Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. Cyril Connolly arguably gives the best summation of Eliot's poem: "Of The Waste Land I will say nothing but that we should read it every April. It is the breviary of post-war disillusion, 'the hope only of empty men,' written in Switzerland after a near break-down, pruned of some connecting passages (including a ship-wreck) by Pound, and as Adrienne Monnier wrote to Pelléas, hard to listen to without tears—'si mystérieusement émouvante'. 'Eliot's Waste Land is I think the justification of the modern experiment since 1900' (Pound)" (Connolly, The Modern Movement, p.36).

Publication in book form had been arranged with Boni & Liveright, but Eliot also offered the poem to Scofield Thayer for the Dial. After some haggling with Thayer (who initially offered a measly $150.00 for the work), it was agreed that Eliot would receive the annual Dial award of $2,000 for the best contribution in return for its appearance in the magazine. Meanwhile, Eliot launched his own literary journal, The Criterion, and he printed The Waste Land in its inaugural issue, virtually simultaneously with the Dial issue. The gesture signalled the end of Eliot and Thayer's friendship.

One of 1000 copies printed, this one unnumbered. The present is bound in flexible cloth, with "mount in" in line 339, p. 41. Presentation copies of the first edition of The Waste Land are rare at auction. Gallup A6a.

Octavo (190 x 128mm). Original black flexible cloth stamped in gilt (a little rubbed at extremities, upper corner just showing). Custom quarter-morocco slipcase. Provenance: Gotham Book Mart ticket to rear pastedown – John Cournos, writer and translator, 1881-1966 (ownership inscription) – Gordon Waldorf (his sale, Sotheby's, 1 April 2014, lot 8).
Place of origin:USA
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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14.01.2025 – 28.01.2025
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