SECONDARY WORLDS: T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures.

First edition, first printing. Original red cloth lettered and ruled in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper designed by Shona Andrew. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the. A lovely copy. In the bright dustwrapper, a light tide mark visible to the lower spine. Not price-clipped, the publisher's £1.80 net sticker covering the original price. A nice copy.

'Secondary Worlds' contains the inaugural series of T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, delivered by W. H. Auden at the University of Kent in Canterbury in October of 1967. As the jacket explains, the poet, chose for the occasion "topics which would, he thought, have been close to Eliot's heart as a poet, a dramatist and a twentieth-century Christian, the first, 'The Martyr As Dramatic Hero', [...] is centred principally on Charles Williams's [1936 play] 'Cranmer', the second, 'The World of the Sagas, demonstrates the light thrown by the sagas on the relationship between the secondary world of art and the primary world of everyday experience; the third, 'The World of Opera', derives from Mr Auden's experience as a librettist; and in the last lecture, 'Words and the Word', Mr Auden addresses himself to the central question which no Christian poet can evade: 'What difference, if any, do my beliefs make either to what I write or to my conception of my vocation?'" Published 25 November 1968 in an edition of 3,000 copies. (Bloomfield and Mendelson A 62)