Strange Meetings
London, The Poetry Bookshop, 1917.
Quarto, 63 pages, all edges uncut.
Quarter cloth and colour pictorial papered boards lightly rubbed and bumped at the extremities; papered boards a little discoloured around the edges and slightly marked at the rear; endpapers and first and last pages a little offset; ownership details in light pencil on the front flyleaf; an excellent copy.
This copy is signed by the author on the title page. Harold Monro (1879-1932) 'is most famous for his role supporting poets and poetry as founder and editor of the magazines "Poetry Review" and "Poetry and Drama" and as proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, a meeting place, in the years leading up to World War I and after, for both Georgian and Modernist poets. Monro is sometimes credited with helping formulate the terms for a more "realistic" kind of war poem. In an editorial for "Poetry and Drama", he called for a direct treatment of the war, poems that would expose "the plain facts of the human psychology of the moment". Monro's war poem "Youth in Arms" is thought to have influenced Wilfred Owen, a visitor and guest of the bookshop in 1916' (Poetry Foundation, online). One example in this collection is 'Lament in 1915 (B.H.W.)'.
Item #118377
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