Lenten Illuminations and Sight Sufficient; Reprinted from the Downside Review No. 245, Summer 1958
Downside Abbey, near Bath: Downside Review Publication, 1959. Octavo (8 1/2 inches tall), stapled in original stiff wrappers with folded flaps, printed in black with price to inner flap and printer to rear panel, 8pp. Slight toning to wrapper, mild bump to top spine, very faint creasing to lower edge. A nearly fine copy. Item #1709
"THESE SOBER-SKIED VOCATIONAL AFTERNOONS IN LENT / THERE'S SANCTITY IN STILLNESS, LET IT BE CONFESSED"
First Downside edition of Siegfried Sassoon's Lenten Illuminations—"surely one of the finest Christian poems of the twentieth century" (Joseph Pearce). The first appearance of two "conversion poems" printed for the Downside Review shortly after Sassoon entered the Catholic Church and preceding their appearance in The Path to Peace (1960). Scarce.
Living in Mells, Sassoon formed a "late friendship" with Monsignor Ronald Knox "that proved instrumental" to his conversion to Catholicism. Without informing his wife, son, or friends, Sassoon entered the Church at Downside Abbey on the Feast of the Assumption in August 1957 (mere days before Knox died). Conversion seemed to rouse Sassoon from a long period of inactivity. "During his first Lent as a Catholic, Sassoon wrote Lenten Illuminations, a candid account of his conversion that invites obvious comparisons with Eliot's Ash Wednesday" (Joseph Pearce). Preceded only by a small issue of 35 copies prepared a year earlier for private circulation by Geoffrey Keynes, the Catholic Records Press reprinted this edition of 200 copies from the Downside Review No. 245 (Summer 1958).
In this same year Sassoon also grew close to Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine nun of Stanbrook Abbey, who selected both poems for The Path to Peace (1960). "Printed and published by his dear friends the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey," The Path to Peace "celebrates the comfort and joy with which his religion filled his last years" (ODNB). Sassoon died in 1967 and was buried at Mells, "a few yards from the resting-place of Ronald Knox whom he so loved and revered" (Stanbrook Abbey Press). Pearce. Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape; Geoffrey Keynes. A Bibliography of Siegfried Sassoon, A60(a), A60(b), A61; Stanbrook Abbey Press: Ninety-Two Years of its History.
Price: $150.00