Publications which I do not have but hope to acquire Crane alphanumerics refer to entries in Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography
Books & Pams Parts of Books Periodicals Printed by GD
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Ezra's Bowmen of Shu: A Letter from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska [to John Cournos] Cambridge, MA: Adams House and Lowell House Printers [i.e., Laurence Scott], 1965. 87 cys. Crane AA1.
My transcription of the text (from the copy in the Library of Congress) follows:
The Renaissance of 1910 was the springtime of our age. All that comes from that clear and virile year is still bright: Brancusi, Strawinsky, Picasso, Ives, Pound, Cocteau, Lipchitz, Modigliani, Epstein, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Gaudierbrzeska, whose hard, clear imagination was the firmest the world had seen since Paolo Uccello. He was the first sculptor in a thousand years to work in modes that had been all that Homer, Ptahotep, Confucius and Sappho knew as beauty in stone. He worked but a few years, leaving us The Red Dancer, The Stags, The Birds, The Ezra Pound, the Boy with Coney, the Imp. He died, still an adolescent though master of his difficult art, a corporal in the French army, on 5 June 1915, fighting back the German attack on Neuville Saint Vaast.
This letter, published for the first time, was written to the young Russian poet and journalist who had introduced him to Ezra Pound, John Cournos. The Kensington colony he asks about are those artists who called themselves Vorticists and sought to make an art formal, direct, and objective, and to oppose that evasiveness which still blights the arts in our time. Never has so clear a springtime been withered by a bitterer frost.
Guy Davenport
Lexington, Kentucky
1964
Colophon:
Both drawing and letter are hand printed for the first time -- the drawing through the generosity of the Fogg Art Museum, and the letter through the generosity of Mr. John Cournos. The text is printed in 14-point Bulmer Roman and Italic by the Adams House & Lowell House Printers in Harvard Yard, March 1965. This is No _55_ of eighty-seven copies.
In pencil on back cover:
"Gift of Roger E. Stoddard July 26, 1967"
Library book number is NC248 .G2 A45 1965 Folio, and the item is located in the Rare Books Room, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
'Canto CX' of Ezra Pound. Editio Princeps. Edited by Guy Davenport and Printed by Laurence Scott. Cambridge, MA: As Sextant Press [Adams House] 1965.
See Crane AA2 for a history of the publication of this canto.
Published in a limited edition as a gift for Ezra Pound on the occasion of his eightieth birthday 30 October 1965.
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