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Lot 453

ELIOT (T.S.)
Four Quartets, third impression, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR "To Aurelio Valls Esqre. with the author's compliments, T.S. Eliot, 13. viii. [19]46" on front free endpaper

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£1,000 - £1,500

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Footnotes

Eliot writes in some detail about the poetry of Aurelio Valls, whose first published work Lenten Songs (1943) he had been sent. Born to Spanish parents in England, in 1917, Valls returned to Spain at age of eighteen to attend university, subsequently becoming a diplomat. Having noted that his "accomplishment in English is certainly remarkable... and [the poems] compare very favourably with most of the new verse that come to my notice", Eliot continues: "The question is, however, what advice one should give to a bilingual poet [and] whether it is possible to be a poet in two languages". He argues that "Spanish... after all, is a magnificent tongue in which great poetry has been and still be written...", and finds it difficult to "advise him to dissipate his energies between the two languages". In the introduction to his The Bilingual Poet (1986, a copy included in the lot) Aurelio Valls writes "I have tried to do for Spanish poetry what Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot did for English so many years ago".

Provenance: Aurelio Valls, and by descent to the current owner.

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