Four Quartets while WWII raged around him. In the midst of this destruction, Eliot meditates on man’s relationship with time and the divine, turning to various poetic and mystical works in his search for understanding. In his spiritual journey, he recycles the language, images, and symbols of St John of the Cross, such as ‘the ten stairs’ on ‘the mystical ladder of divine love.’]]> T. S. Eliot]]> Edited by Richard Aldington]]> Ulysses was published by Pear Tree Press, a private press established in 1988 by Tara McLeod. Pear Tree Press publishes limited edition hand-printed letterpress books and prints. The Special Collections’ copy of Ithaca is no. 15 of 20. It is opened to a list of subjects Bloom and Stephen deliberate, including the Roman Catholic Church and Jesuit education.]]> James Joyce]]> La Prose du Transsibérien, a poem telling of his trip in 1905 on the newly opened Trans-Siberian Express railway. The work is a supreme example of European Modernism, a product of simultaneisme, which promoted the concept of the continuous present. It is a collaborative work, with images (including the Eiffel Tower) by artist Sonia Delaunay. The original edition unfolds to over six feet in length, and, according to legend, if the proposed edition of 150 copies were laid end to end, they would be as tall as the Eiffel Tower. In reality some 60 were produced; only seven are recorded as held in institutions. This copy is reproduced from the Yale University Press facsimile, 2009.]]> Blaise Cendrars]]> Poetics into Arabic, but he is struggling to define drama since he has never seen a play. Arranging elements in his story, Borges prepares his character for a moment of understanding, but Averroes fails to grasp the significance of what he has seen and heard. In this story, Borges draws on European and Eastern scholarship and literature, inventively making it new.]]> Jorge Luis Borges]]> Lord Jim as moments ‘when we see, hear, understand ever so much – everything – in a flash – before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.’]]> Joseph Conrad]]> Ezra Pound]]> Marius, Pater examines philosophical ideas, sensations, and moments of vision as Marius tries to arrest ‘clauses of experience.’]]> Walter Pater]]> Mayday as a gift for his girlfriend Helen Baird. Parodying medieval romance, Faulkner follows Sir Galwyn of Arthgyl as he seeks the beautiful girl who appeared to him in a vision during his chapel vigil. With Hunger and Pain as his constant companions, Sir Galwyn’s quest takes him to an enchanted forest. He slays a small dragon, encounters Time and Tristram, and briefly loves Yseult, Elys, and Aelia. This image shows the first page of text from Faulkner’s carefully handcrafted book.]]> William Faulkner]]> Mornings in Mexico is a collection of travel essays, which incorporates Mexican myth and history. In the first essay, D. H. Lawrence describes two malevolent parrots as they mimic the yapping of a dog, and Corasmin, the ‘little fat, curly white dog,’ who appears resigned to their shrieking – and the heat and his fleas. The narrator realises that the thoughts he is projecting onto Corasmin belong to a different cycle of evolution. Quickly rejecting the evolutionary view, he prefers the Aztec account of successive suns and the convulsive ‘bang’ of history.]]> D. H. Lawrence]]> T. S. Eliot]]> New Poems. Influenced by Auguste Rodin’s sculptures and Paul Cézanne’s still-lifes, Rilke’s poems lyrically recreate architectural objects as verbal ones, revealing the internal vitality and value of the object and conveying to the reader ‘the experience of seeing them anew, intensely and dynamically as they are in their innermost core’ (Marielle Sutherland). In the Cathedral Cycle, Rilke recreates a Gothic cathedral with its architectural and sculptural details: the figure of an angel (with a sun dial), a portal, a rose window, and a capital.]]> Rainer Maria Rilke]]> Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile in 1894 and printed 500 copies. Amis and Amile are loving friends who cannot be separated even in death: when they are killed in battle and buried apart, their coffins are found together the next morning.]]> William Morris]]> Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe relates the life story of Eugene Gant, who leaves his home town in North Carolina, attends Harvard University, teaches English in New York, and travels in Europe. Wolfe’s fictional self meditates on time and the creative process. He believes that the artist is motivated by an ‘intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man’s living, a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes.’]]> Thomas Wolfe]]> Personæ]]> Ezra Pound]]> fin amor (fine or courtly love): this mystic love transcends time and space, making lovers immortal and granting them visionary knowledge.]]> Ezra Pound]]> Gerard Manley Hopkins]]> Pomes Penyeach as a limited edition volume. In this later, handcrafted book, he imitated the work of medieval monks, handwriting the text of the poems and using his daughter Lucia’s illuminations of the initial letters for each poem.]]> James Joyce]]> Giuseppe Bovini]]> Giuseppe Bovini]]> Ripostes, Pound drew attention to the Imagist movement, developing that style in his own work and appending several poems by T. E. Hulme as examples of this new poetics. He included his translation of the Old English poem ‘The Seafarer,’ upsetting some readers by writing a poem based on his own personal interpretation of the medieval work rather than a literal translation of it.]]> Ezra Pound]]> Plotinus]]> Ship of Fools.]]> Katherine Anne Porter]]> Das Narrenschiff, a satirical poem, especially critical of corruption in the Church. She was taken with ‘this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity.’ She assembles a party of disparate characters, who sail from Mexico to Europe on the Vera, a German passenger-ship. In this microcosm of life, Porter treats contemporary political events and human weaknesses and vices.]]> Katherine Anne Porter]]> Stepping Heavenward is ostensibly a scholarly account of the life of Blessed Jeremy Cibber, first American beatified, who converted England to Catholicism. It is, however, a savage satire on Aldington’s former friend T. S. Eliot. Jealous of Eliot’s celebrity, Aldington supported Vivienne Eliot as the Eliots’ marriage disintegrated. Aldington makes thinly veiled references to Eliot’s life; for example, Cibber takes a job in a haberdashery, as Eliot took one in Lloyd’s bank. Cibber is a ‘cool fish,’ and, as his wife, Adele Paleologue, is driven into ‘wild neurasthenia,’ ‘their quarrels were conducted on coldly intellectual lines.’ Aldington brutally mocks Eliot’s drift into religion.]]> Richard Aldington]]>