Sangschaw ( Inscribed and Signed By The Author To Literary Critic Douglas Sealy)

First Edition published by William Blackwood And Sons in 1925. Second issue with pale blue cloth and black titling. The BOOK is in Very Good+ condition. Some pushing at the spine ends with a little rubbing to the edges. Some toning to the text-block with some spotting to the prelims and endpapers. Occasional light spot to the pages in places. The WRAPPER is complete and is in Very Good+ or better condition. Toning to the edges, folds and the spine. Light creasing and mild edge-wear at the spine ends with a little loss. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. The book has been Inscribed and Signed By the Author to the front blank endpaper; Signed for my friend, Douglas Sealy, with every high regard and good wish from Hugh M'Diarmid, Dublin, Dec' 67'. The recipient Douglas Sealy was a literary critic, teacher and a renowned translator of Irish poetry. Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve) was Scotland's most influential and controversial writer in the 20th century. He urged and enabled the regeneration of all aspects of Scotland's literature and culture through his poetry, polemical writing and political activity. 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' (1926) is generally regarded as Scotland's masterpiece of Modernism. 'He started writing in Scots, using words and phrases he knew from boyhood and acquired from reading in dictionaries and works of Scottish literature from earlier eras. The poems of Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926) and A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle (1926) were shocking, adult, wry, rebarbative, difficult, piercingly sweet, unsentimental and brutal. They established a new dispensation for Scottish literature, and modernist lusts: for the body and the sexually explicit cognate with Joyce and Lawrence; for the local and demotic, cognate with William Carlos Williams; for the difficult, cognate with Eliot; for the vatic and austere, cognate with Yeats and Pound; for the intellectually demanding, cognate with Stevens and Valéry; but uniquely in the Scottish context, reclaiming a literary history that had fallen into neglect and obfuscation. Forget about Burns, he advised, go back to Dunbar and Henryson, recover and reclaim a national tradition that goes back through millennia.' (Scottish Poetry Library). A wonderful signed association copy of the author's first poetry collection and scarce with such attributes. Ashton Rare Books welcomes direct contact.