e e cummings 1923 Puella Mea Golden Eagle Press Hardcover w/Slipcase

Up For Sale Today is

Puella Mea

by

E. E. Cummings

Hardcover. 8vo. Published by The Golden Eagle Press, Mt Vernon, New York. 1923 (1949). Unpaginated. Illustrated with drawings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Amedeo Modigliani. First, thus.

Slipcased in gold paper covered slipcase. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present.  Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

First separately published edition, after original appearance in The Dial, and inclusion in Tulips and Chimneys collection. Published before he did away with the capitalization and punctuation in his name.

His first manuscript book of poems, 'Tulips & Chimneys,' was a gathering of work in traditional verse forms as well as in his newest unconventional forms of expressiveness. It included lush lyrics from his Harvard years, tender love poems, erotic epigrams, sonnets (some crammed with literary allusion, others merely attempting to depict ordinary scenes of life?on city streets, in caf?s, in rooming houses), celebrations of the beauties of the natural world, and harsh satires directed at politicians, generals, professors, the clergy, and national leaders. The publishing world was not yet ready for some of Cummings's poems about drunks, prostitutes, Salvation Army workers, gangsters, or bums. Thus, the original version of Cummings's manuscript did not survive the forbidding selectivity of editors, and it eventually emerged as three books: Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), and (privately printed) & (1925)."