i : Six Nonlectures
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Signed/Limited edition. Publisher's quarter white cloth over black cloth, in printed dust jacket ($6.50). 114, [6] pp. 9.5" x 6" Faint touches of foxing upper end papers, jacket verso, and top edge, else fine in very good, lightly edge worn dust jacket, with a bit of shallow chipping spine head. Item #245561
"I HAVEN'T THE REMOTEST INTENTION OF POSING AS A LECTURER"
E.E. Cummings returned to his alma mater in 1952 to turn lecturing on its head; "I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer... What has always fascinated me is not teaching, but learning; and I assure you that if the acceptance of a Charles Eliot Norton professorship hadn’t rapidly entangled itself with the expectation of learning a very great deal, I should now be somewhere else…." Cummings gleefully refused to follow in T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost's footsteps of offering critical analysis. Instead, he gallivanted through his childhood, mused on poetry, and dedicated the last fifteen minutes of each lecture to reading beloved poems by other authors. In prose that can't help but resemble his unconventional stylistic flavor, i collected all six of Cummings' lectures, offering an intimate (egotistical?) insight into the avant-garde poet.
Limited to 300 copies signed by E.E. Cummings.
Price: $1,250.00