Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (The Hogarth Essays, First Series, no. IV)

London: The Hogarth Press, 1927. ~Original cream paper covers, slightly browned. Design in black to front cover. With scarce original dustwrapper: Italian-made paper printed with geometric design in orange. Dustwrapper chipped, much faded, and almost entirely cracked at spine, but neatly reinforced at spine with archive tape. The last of the Hogarth Essays series to have Vanessa Bell's design of a woman reading to cover. Pencil owner's signature of M. G. Lloyd Thomas: Mary Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas (1899-1978), literary scholar, Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Girton, Cambridge, and later Headmistress of Channing School, Highgate. A few pencil scholarly annotations in the same hand. This volume, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1924 (this is the second impression), draws together three essays published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1921. The 1924 collection had an immediate impact: F. R. Leavis wrote that '(I)t was with the publication in this form of those essays (the Hogarth Press had recently published The Waste Land) that Eliot became the important contemporary critic' ('T. S. Eliot’s Stature as Critic: A Revaluation', Commentary 26, 1958). Eliot's essay seeks to re-centre English verse around the 17th-century English metaphysical tradition as opposed to the romantic poets and their Victorian successors; it offers Eliot's famous framing of the seventeenth century as seeing 'a dissociation of sensibility' from which 'we have never recovered' (p. 30). Woolmer 43. ~Robust packaging. Overseas tracking available on request. . 2nd impress. Paperback. Good+/Good. 46pp. Text block sound & unmarked.