A CHOICE OF KIPLING'S VERSE: Made by T. S. Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling.

First edition, first printing. Original blue cloth lettered in green (a little faded) to the spine. Upper edge coloured brown, lower edges untrimmed, in dustwrapper. A number of pages remain uncut. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout, without any spotting or marks, the wartime economy paper unusually crisp. In the better than very good dustwrapper, a little faded and rubbed to the spine, rubbed and nicked to spine tips and corners. Not price-clipped (8s. 6d. net to the front flap). Loosely laid in is a later National Portrait Gallery postcard of Sir Philip Burne-Jones' painting of Kipling at his desk. An uncommonly well-preserved first printing of Eliot's landmark Kipling anthology.

"Kipling has accompanied me ever since boyhood", wrote T. S. Eliot in 1958, "when I discovered the early verse [...] and [...] stories. There are boyhood enthusiasms which one outgrows; there are writers who impress one deeply at some time before or during adolescence and whose work one never re-reads in later life. But Kipling is different." Indeed, the older writer haunts the later poet's work. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', he notes, "would never have been called 'Love Song' but for Kipling's [...] 'The Love Song of Har Dyal'", while 'The Hollow Men' borrows its title from Kipling's 'The Broken Men'. The anthology was contemporary with Eliot's wartime 'Four Quartets' ('The Dry Salvages', the third, issued the same year) and the jacket copy notes that publication comes "at a time when all that Kipling prized is in danger". The introduction examines Kipling's complex and troubling engagement with the ideas and realities of empire and, in turn, provides an insight into Eliot's own views (also complex and troubling). For Eliot, Kipling was the exception to the rule that writers cannot excel in both verse and prose (Meredith, Lawrence and Hardy are, he avers, poets who would have been better "had they chosen to dedicate their whole lives to that form"). Eliot's landmark selection was a timely re-evaluation of Kipling's hitherto neglected verse. Published 11 December 1941, 10,120 copies were printed (Gallup B39).