A Notebook on My New Poems [with] Badinerie: or, Poems of Entrances and Exits without regard to time [with] Dr Donne and Gargantua, Cantos Seven and Eight [with] An Indian Summer: eight poems on Indian themes [with] A Look at Sowerby's English Mushrooms and Fungi: [a poem]

Sir Sacheverell SITWELL Bt

Published by Brackley: [privately printed], 1974

About this Item

5 vols. Wrappers. Spines slightly darkened. [110 copies of each printed, as a single order in May 1974], these copies from the library of Sir Charles and Lady Johnston, with, in A Notebook on My Poems, a presentation autograph mote signed from the author loosely inserted, 1p. 8vo, Weston, 13 May 1974. "I would like to think that, if only in reticence, I have surpassed the record of another and more famous poet who had no poems printed before he was fifty-seven; and perhaps the motive in each instance was the same, except that I left the field of action in 1936 and had not come back to it in 1973; or I would call it a retirement of thirty-six years . . . I only hope that some few of the poems may be the better for their cellarage, or long keeping . . . It may be a nearly unique situation to have been well known and lauded as a poet during the first part of one's life, and to have been forgotten in this respect during the second half which was very much more active in poetry than the first. I believe that my true vocation has been in poetry . . . But also, I have tried to bring the instinctive principles of poetry into everything else that I have written, beginning with Southern Baroque Revisited" (from A Notebook on My Poems). "Poems with much love to you both," writes the author. "The printer is making an estimate and is letting you know at once. Much love Sachie". Sir Charles Johnston, sometime ambassador to Jordan, last Governor of Aden, and High Commissioner to Australia, used Sacheverell Sitwell's loyal Brackley printers for his own Estuary in Scotland and other poems (1974). The Sitwells had first met Johnston in 1948 when he was posted in Madrid.

Seller Inventory # T100622

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Notebook on My New Poems [with] Badinerie: or, Poems of Entrances and Exits without regard to time [with] Dr Donne and Gargantua, Cantos Seven and Eight [with] An Indian Summer: eight poems on Indian themes [with] A Look at Sowerby's English Mushrooms and Fungi: [a poem]
• Publisher: Brackley: [privately printed]
• Publication Date: 1974
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good