BIB_ID
433342
Accession number
MA 22734
Creator
Spender, Stephen, 1909-1995.
Display Date
Place of writing not identified, 1971-1976.
Credit line
Purchased on the Drue Heinz Twentieth-Century Literature Fund, 2019.
Description
1 item (approx 95 pages) ; 22.5 cm
Notes
Dating of the notebook based on internal evidence.
The drafts that appear in this notebook contain extensive edits, and they differ significantly from the published versions of the poems.
As a Christmas gift to Spender, his brother Humphrey (a photographer, painter, and designer) decorated the notebook's cover. Spender later gave the notebook to Bryan Obst, a young ornithologist with whom he had a significant relationship late in life.
The drafts that appear in this notebook contain extensive edits, and they differ significantly from the published versions of the poems.
As a Christmas gift to Spender, his brother Humphrey (a photographer, painter, and designer) decorated the notebook's cover. Spender later gave the notebook to Bryan Obst, a young ornithologist with whom he had a significant relationship late in life.
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed "To Stephen / for Christmas 1975 / with love from Humphrey" (leaf 1 recto). Further inscribed: "To Bryan" (leaf 1 verso) and "With love and with many thanks for making my / time at Gainesville so happy, / from Stephen June '76" (leaf 2 recto).
Provenance
Purchased from James Cummins, January 3, 2019.
Summary
Contains working drafts of ten poems, including nine pages of drafts of Spender's elegy for his friend Igor Stravinsky, "Late Stravinsky Listening to Late Beethoven"; other poems about friends including W. H. Auden and Cyril Connolly; Spender's translation of a poem by Friedrich Holderlin; a draft of Spender's last published poem, "Timothy Corsellis," a tribute to a British poet-pilot who died at the age of twenty in a plane crash during the Second World War; and a pencil sketch of a landscape.
Housed in
Blue cloth drop-spine box (25.2 cm)
Catalog link
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