Auden, W.H.

The Gobble Poem

London, England, UK: Fuck Books Unlimited, 1967. First English Printing. "He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along | The back of my sofa. The afternoon sumlight struck | The blond hairs on his wrist near my head. his chin was strong, | his mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck." (First stanza, The Gobble Poem, pg. 1). W.H. Auden (aka Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907-1973) was a British-American poet noted for his stylistic and technical achievement, his engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and his variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems exemplify those themes ie: love, with "Funeral Blues;" political and social in "The Shield of Achilles;" cultural and psychological in "The Age of Anxiety;" and religious in "Horae Canonicae." Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews as well and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential with critical views on his work ranging from sharply dismissive to strongly affirmative. In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas became influential. Auden's formal influences ended up becoming so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of many of the Beat Generation poets was partly a reaction against his influence. The Gobble Poem(aka The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral or A Day for a Lay) is an erotic poem by Auden. Thought to have been written in 1948, the poem gleefully describes in graphic detail a homosexual encounter involving an act of fellatio. The syncopated poem runs to 34 stanzas of four lines, with an ABAB rhyming scheme and mixes colloquial language with formal expression, using clever internal and external rhymes and half-rhymes. Copies were circulated to Auden's friends but it remained unpublished until 1965, when "the bridge between the Beat and hippie generations" American poet Ed Sanders (b. 1939) obtained a bootleg copy and published it (without Auden's permission) in his New York counterculture magazine Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (Vol 5 No 8) in March 1965. See also item No.s 6875 and 6877 for more Auden poems. From the collection of Richard Cupidi (b. 1945), our esteemed mate in the UK who managed the fabled Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, England for founder Bill Butler (1934-1977, the famed American-expatriate bookseller & publisher). From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Unicorn proffered & published many outstanding productions by William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard et al., some of which have become the scarcest, all-but-unobtainable Beat-&-Beyond collectibles (see for example our item no. 8217). After prevailing against censorious harrassment efforts, Unicorn closed & Butler died in short order. Cupidi went on to found the Public House Bookshop in Brighton, which had a long & successful run but is also now closed, & he still resides there. We have been honored to obtain what Cupidi has termed "The Last Hurrah," all the remaining treasures of Unicorn & Public House, some of which have become the stuff of myth. Stapled Sheets in Stapled Wrapper: First edition, first English printing per copyright page. A vintage, highly sought after Auden collectible with very distinguished provenance. In relatively fine-to-very fine condition with moderate age-toning mostly to fine edges of front & back wrappers; minor bumping/creasing to corners of same; minor rubbing, scratching & some slight spot-staining to front & back wrappers; minor age-toning & rubbing to text block. Interior fine-to-very fine with minor age-toning mostly to blank margins and fine edges of inner wrappers and pages leaves; minor staple imprints near spine of inner wrappers. Fine-Very Fine. [Item #8266]

Price: $100.00