INSCRIBED
POUND, Ezra.
Quia Pauper amavi.
London, The Egoist Ltd, [1919].
8vo, pp. 51, [1], with a half-title; autograph correction to p. 34 correcting ‘wherefore’ to ‘wherefrom’, as in most copies; some scattered foxing, worst at the front, else a very good copy in a fine example of the original quarter green cloth and plain boards, printed paper spine label; bookplate of the BBC broadcaster D.G. Bridson.
£1750
US $2161 €2028
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First edition, one of 500 ordinary copies (there were also 100 signed copies on handmade paper’, inscribed ‘Bridson’s copy / 11 Ap ’59 / Ezra Pound’. This work contained the first English publication of Cantos I–III, not printed in that order.
Pound and D.G. Bridson first crossed paths in the 1930s when Pound included a poem by Bridson in his Active Anthology (1933) – they corresponded at that time but they did not meet until 1951 when Bridson, now a force to reckoned with in BBC radio, came to Washington DC to record Pound from his detention in St Elizabeth’s Hospital. ‘To me, Pound … was the greatest living poet’, Bridson later wrote in Prospero and Ariel. Bridson produced Women of Trachis for radio in 1954, visited Pound again in 1956 to make some recordings, including ‘Four Steps’, Pound’s famous justification for his support of Mussolini; and then shot a television profile on Pound in Rapallo in 1959, on which occasion Pound inscribed a number of books to Bridson including the present one. They continued to meet and talk until 1963 as Pound lapsed slowly into silence.
Gallup A17a.
