Taliessin Through Logres / The Region of the Summer Stars
London: Oxford University Press, (1960). Octavo (8 inches tall), original red cloth, gilt spine, original dust jacket. Mild offsetting to blank flyleaves, else Fine. Item #1714
"THE ORGANIC BODY SANG TOGETHER; / DIALECTS OF THE WORLD SPRANG IN BYZANTIUM / BACK THEY RANG TO SING IN BYZANTIUM; / THE STREETS REPEAT THE SOUND OF THE THRONE"
Comprehensive edition of Charles Williams's Arthurian poetry—a posthumous "literary oddity of great interest" from the most eccentric of the Inklings. With a general and two individual title pages, this undated edition collects the 1954 third impression of Taliessin Through Logres and the 1960 fourth impression of The Region of the Summer Stars (first published in 1944). A bright, fresh copy.
Though Williams is usually identified as a Poet, many critics have been perplexed, dismissive, or openly hostile to his verse. "His most ambitious book of poetry, Taliessin Through Logres, a sequence of dense, elliptical poems on the Arthurian legend, [first] appeared in 1938" (Zaleski and Zaleski). At the time, Taliessin was championed by C.S. Lewis who "bubbled with enthusiasm, telling Williams it was a 'great work, full of glory.'" Despite a critical backlash in the 1950's, Lewis remained a devoted and persistent custodian of Williams's legacy and he made an eloquent defense of Williams's conception of Byzantium: "The image of the Empire is the final form of something that had always haunted Williams and which he often referred to simply as ‘the city’. The word is significant. Williams was a Londoner of the Londoners; Johnson or Chesterton never exulted more than he in their citizenship. On many of us the prevailing impression made by the London streets is one of chaos; but Williams, looking on the same spectacle, saw chiefly an image—an imperfect, pathetic, heroic, and majestic image—of Order. Such is Byzantium—Order, envisaged not as restraint nor even as a convenience but as a beauty and splendour. Perhaps no element in Williams’s imagination separates him so widely as this from other writers" (Arthurian Torso).
With Williams's original Dedication to the publisher of Oxford University Press: "For Humphrey Milford / Under Whom We Observed an Appearance of Byzantium." Charles Williams began working for Oxford University Press in 1908. He remained at OUP until his death in 1945, flourishing in the Press's Amen House offices. "A few years after Williams arrived, the energetic, creative, and ambitious Humphrey Milford (1877-1952) became publisher. This proved a godsend for Williams, for Milford had a knack for taking successful risks not only with literary projects but with his editorial staff. He kept Williams on a very loose leash, expanded his responsibilities, and hired a handful of other eccentric, imaginative figures" (Zaleski). Milford became a figure in Williams's penchant for legend and mythmaking. "Most will agree that Lewis, blinded by friendship, passed from praise to adulation when assessing Williams's poetry, and few will disagree with T.S. Eliot and many others that to read Williams's Arthurian works is to enter a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities," though Eliot does offer guarded praise for patient readers: "absorbing after we have got the hang of what he is after" (Zaleski and Zaleski). Zaleski and Zaleski. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings; Lewis, Arthurian Torso: A Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams.
Price: $150.00