THE LORDS OF LIMIT: Essays on Literature and Ideas.

First US paperback edition, first printing. Inscribed by Hill to the composer, Hugh Wood. Original white card wraps lettered in pale brown to spine and front panel, in the dustwrapper designed by Richard Rossiter. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm (there is a light crease to the spine which doesn't affect the binding), the contents clean throughout. There is a touch of light creasing to the outer edge of the front panel. In the dustwrapper, toned to the rear panel and flaps, and with a small closed tear to the upper edge of the fold between front panel and spine. Not price-clipped ($8.95 printed to the rear panel). A scarce signed copy of Hill's first volume of essays.

Inscribed in black ink to the half title, "Hugh — / from Geoffrey / March 1990". The recipient is the British composer, Hugh Wood (1932-2021). The composer and poet were great friends, both teaching at Cambridge. Hill's 2005 volume 'Scenes from Comus' (setting parts of Milton's great masque) was named after Wood's 1965 BBC Proms Commission, and dedicated to the composer for his seventieth birthday. Wood reciprocated with 'Tenebrae', a setting of eight poems from the poet's 1978 collection of the same title, for Hill's seventieth birthday. In his note for that piece, Wood wrote "I have admired the poetry of Geoffrey Hill throughout the many years of our friendship. We are exact contemporaries, born ten days apart, so our 70th birthdays came up close in the same year. I was honoured when Geoffrey borrowed the title of a piece of mine for the book of poems he inscribed to me". 'The Lords of Limit' (the title comes from Auden) established Hill as, in addition to a great poet, a fine essayist. Eric Griffiths, in his 'Encounter' review of the book, declared it "the most important first book of criticism by a major English poet since [Eliot's] 'The Sacred Wood'". The volume includes (among others) Hill's 1978 inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds (Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement'), as well as essays on Robert Southwell, Ben Jonson's Roman plays, Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline', Hopkins, T. H. Green, and John Crowe Ransom.