The Auroras of Autumn

New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1950. First edition. One of 3,000 copies. 193, [1] pp. 8vo. Original blue cloth, gilt-lettered on spine. Slight edgewear, dust jacket unclipped (priced "$3.00 net"), spine sunned; some wear at folds; minor soiling to rear pane. First edition. One of 3,000 copies. 193, [1] pp. 8vo. Inscribed by Stevens to Bernard Reis in 1950, an accountant and art collector in New York, who later became the executor of the Mark Rothko estate. Stevens would've known Reis through his interest in the visual arts. He'd visited the famous 1913 Armory Show, when he was renting an apartment from the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, and frequented the salon (truncated) of Walter Arensberg, whose collection of modernist art would form the basis of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while he was writing Harmonium, his first book. Stevens closely followed the developments of the avant-garde in the visual arts, and his poetic concerns were often inspired by what he saw there. Harmonium, reflects his interest in first generation Dada, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction form a dialectic of concern around Surrealism and Abstraction, while this book, The Auroras of Autumn – containing "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," "A Primitive Like an Orb," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" – was written in parallel with Abstract-Expressionism.

A great association from the world of American high modernism. Edelstein A 14.a.1 (Inventory #: 371597)