Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

Norfolk, CT: New Directions,, 1940. Inscribed to a fellow poet and White Horse Tavern regular First US edition, first printing, rare presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his friend and fellow poet on the front free endpaper, "from Dylan Thomas to Jose Garcia Villa". This is a superb association: the two poets moved in the same circle, and Thomas remained an abiding influence on Villa's poetry. José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908. In 1929, he published a series of erotic poems called "Man-Songs" in the Philippines Herald Magazine and was fined for obscenity and suspended for a year from law school. That same year, his short story "Mir-i-nisa" won a prize of 1,000 pesetas, which he used to travel to the United States. He published a collection of stories, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, with Scribner in 1933. He then moved to the Greenwich Village, where he was the only Asian poet in the modernist community that included e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and devoted himself to poetry written under the pseudonym Doveglion (Dove, Eagle, Lion). His poetry won him many awards and fellowships, as well as positions at New Directions, CUNY, and the New School. Villa and Thomas were both regulars at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village and were both promoted early in their careers by Edith Sitwell. One of the most widely circulated photos of Villa is of him at Thomas's funeral in 1953, and his 1954 poem "Death and Dylan Thomas" appears in many anthologies. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in yellow. With dust jacket. Endpapers browned, contents mildly toned, a near-fine copy in very good jacket, lightly toned and rubbed, with a few small chips, else bright. Rolph B7.