E.E. Cummings

Inscribed limited-edition copy of cummings's 50 Poems.

• e.e. cummings (American).
• New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940.
• Octavo.
• Signed on the flyleaf and inscribed on the verso.
• Number 40 of 150 signed, numbered editions.
• Bound in original tan cloth with leather label to upper board lettered in gilt, spine gilt, with acetate wrapper and original slipcase.

Owned by José García Villa, a close friend of cummings, and to whom it's inscribed. Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press." Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973, he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

This item is final sale and not eligible for return.

José García Villa