What is a Classic?; An address delivered before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October 1944
London: Faber and Faber, 1945. First Edition, Second Impression. 8vo; 8 1/4 x 5 3/8 inches (218 x 135 mm); 32 pp., printed on heavy laid paper, lower edges uncut. Bright blue/turquoise cloth boards, gilt lettering on spine, light bumping on corners and tail of spine. Cream dust jacket printed in black and red, price clipped, a little thumbed and faded, extremities of dust jacket frayed with small chips at head and tail of spine panel. Bookseller ticket pasted inside front cover, Melbourne, Australia.
[Gallup A45b].
This is the text of the first Annual Address to the Virgil Society, of which T. S. Eliot was the First President, 1943/44. Eliot sets out to define that the classic is a work that reflects the maturity of a culture. Indeed, he argues that “[a] classic can occur only when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind.”
From the estate of Robert Cecil Bald (1901 – 1965), an Australian scholar of English Literature, who moved to the US to teach at Cornell University in 1937 and was then a professor at the University of Chicago from 1952 to 1965.
Condition: Near fine / Very good.
Item number: 1129
Price: $600.00
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