A Quinzaine for this Yule.

POUND, (Ezra).

First edition, second issue. 8vo., lacking title page. London, [Printed for Elkin Mathews by W. Pollock and Co.] 1908

A disreputable but charismatic copy of one of the great rarities of twentieth century literature, lacking the title page and with evidence of earlier damp damage around the lower edges of all leaves. Redemption is supplied by the previous owner Victor Plarr, whose name (not seemingly in his hand) appears on the first blank leaf, and who supplies an original poem, signed Nov 21 '09, on the terminal blank. The eight line poem, which can only be read as invective against Pound and his pretensions, is a fascinating piece of evidence in the history of Pound's London years, demonstrating at the least an imbalance in what the two parties thought of each other.

Plarr, a founder-member of the Rhymer's Club, represented for Pound the transition between the old guard and the new. They dined regularly, and Pound gave Plarr a level of immortality beyond that which he could have expected from his own (seldom-anthologised) work, by including in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley a sympathetic portrait of him as M. Verog, "out of step with the decade,/ Detached from his contemporaries,/ Neglected by the young". In Pound's preface to the Poems of Lionel Johnson he quotes Johnson's view of Plarr as "delightful, a kind of half-French, half-Celtic Dobson with nature and the past and dying traditions and wild races for his theme." This poem, however, suggests that the affection was rather one-sided:

Oh, in our dwindling age, 'tis ours to meet

Rubbish Unspeakable at every turn.

Claudian the Teutons had perforce to greet,

And we dare not America now to spurn.

The Quack survives when Arts of Learning die,

And every critic learns to cringe & lie!

I have not long to live, but let me damn

Asses while I, once Victor Plarr, still am!

Gallup A2, one of 100 copies of the second state, of a total edition of 200.