O TO BE A DRAGON

New York: Viking Press, The, 1959. original two-toned cloth; printed dust jacket. 8vo. original two-toned cloth; printed dust jacket. 37 pages. First edition. Inscribed and signed by the author on the front free endpaper. Fine in near fine jacket.



Includes Author Notes [pp. 33-37]. "Nobody by Miss Moore writes like Miss Moore - that is, in strictest accordance with poetic rules invented by and for herslelf. "I feel that the form," she says, "is the outward equivalent of a determing inner conviction, and that the rhythm is the person." Here, in fifteen distinguished new poems, she presents such diverse subjects as dragons, chameleons, jellyfish, the early Jamestown settlers, the arctic ox, Saint Nicholas, Saint Jerome, and the Brooklyn (not Los Angeles) Dodgers. All these are treated with a sense of delight in the variety of life, as well a sa mastery of the exact comparison and of the phrase that illuminates a whole experience. Beginning with The Dial Award in 1924, Marianne Moore has received almost every honor that can be granted to an American poet, including the high esteem of her contemporaries. T.S. Eliot said of her poems that they "form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time .in which an original sensibility and alert intelligence and deep feeling have been engaged in a maintaining the life of the English language." W.H. Auden went further. "The endless musical and structural possibilities of Miss Moore's invention," he said, "are a treasure from which all future English poets will be able to plunder. I have already stolen a great deal myself." - from the inner front jacket flap.