Wilfred; Edmund Blunden ( editor ). The Poems of Wilfred Owen. A New Edition Including Many Pieces Now First Published, And Notices of his Life and Work.

by OWEN

£4,250 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

Edith Olivier’s Owen, Inscribed by Sassoon OWEN, Wilfred; Edmund Blunden ( editor ). The Poems of Wilfred Owen. A New Edition Including Many Pieces Now First Published, And Notices of his Life and Work. London: Chatto and Windus . 1931. 8vo. Original purple cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the dust-jacket (printed in burgundy and black) priced 6s. net to the front flap; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 135, [1 (blank)]; photographic portrait frontispiece with tissue guard, fore- and tail-edges untrimmed; spine and upper edge sunned, slight soiling and rubbing to spine, a few marks to covers, some wear to spine ends and corners; else a very good copy in like wrapper; Siegfried Sassoon’s monogrammed presentation inscription to Edith Oliver to half-title, dated 21 March 1931; housed in a custom drop-back solander box of red quarter morocco with cloth sides, spine lettered directly in gilt. Inscribed by Owen’s first editor and instigator of this edition, Siegfried Sassoon, to his friend, confidante, and matchmaker Edith Olivier (1872–1948). Blunden’s extended edition of Owen’s poems appeared eleven years after the slimmer volume edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell in 1920. A war veteran and distinguished poet himself, Blunden was urged to edit the volume by Sassoon, who was never pleased with the earlier edition. ‘[A] more experienced and exacting editor’ (Stallworthy), Blunden added thirty-seven poems to the twenty-three in the 1920 edition, as well as a memoir of Owen and notes

• Binding: Hardcover

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