William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924. Hardcover. Small 4to. Grey cloth spine with black calf label and green paper over boards. xv, 487pp. Frontispiece, illustrations. Very good. Mild edgewear. Tight and nice first edition of this scarce and influential volume of Blake criticism, which did for interest in Blake what Raymond Weaver's biography of Herman Melville ("Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic," 1921) did a few years earlier for interest in that neglected writer. This exceptional copy bears a choice presentation inscription from the author in blue fountain pen on the front flyleaf: "To Mark Turbyfill / who is one of the very few / who should know what I / was trying to get at. / S. Foster Damon." Turbyfill (1896-1990) was a Chicago poet, dancer and artist who often appeared in Margaret Anderson's "The Little Review" and Harriet Monroe's "Poetry" magazine (which devoted the entire May 1926 issue to his poem "A Marriage with Space"). Damon clearly found Turbyfill's avant-garde metaphysical verse akin to Blake's verse, as this inscription attests. Damon (1893-1971) was an academic long associated with Brown University, and was also a poet and member of the Harvard Aesthetes; as a critic he is remembered for this volume and also the 1965 "Blake Dictionary."