Walt Whitman

Twice signed presentation copy of Whitman's Two Rivulets with postcard from H.R. Haweis, sent to Whitman.

• Walt Whitman (American).
• Two Rivulets, Including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs and Passage to India.
• Camden, New Jersey: Author's Edition, 1876.
• Octavo.
• Signed "Walt Whitman born May 31, 1819" on mounted frontispiece photograph of Whitman by G. F. E. Pearsall, and inscribed on the front free endpaper, 4 section titles.
• Bound in half cream Morocco over marbled boards and brown Morocco label lettered in gilt, and yellow endpapers.

In addition to the signed frontispiece photograph, Whitman inscribed "H.R. Haweis from the author" on the flyleaf before mailing. Along with the Author's Edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had between 600 and 650 copies of this work printed for the American Centennial. He signed the photographic frontispiece as he sold them from his home in Camden. The postcard was sent by H.R. Haweis from London, requesting Whitman to "Please also send two vols: Leaves [...] and Two Rivulets)."

The present copy was later owned by the artist, poet and writer José García Villa, who 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."

This item is final sale and not eligible for return.

H.R. Haweis (presentation inscription) — José García Villa, thence by descent.

Academy of American Poets, "José García Villa".

BAL 21413.

Feinberg 297.

Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen.

Wells & Goldsmith pp. 20-22.