The dedication copy. First edition. Octavo. Publisher’s original blue cloth. Inscribed by Charles Williams to the front free endpaper, “To R.M.L. from Charles Willaims as a tribute to memory, March 1930.” The printed dedication in the book reads, “To R.M.L. in gratitude and affection.”
 
A near fine copy.
 
PROVENANCE: Robert Maynard Leonard (1869-1941), English poet and critic, inscribed for him by the author.
 
The dedication copy of Charles Williams book of modern poetry criticism, inscribed for fellow poet Robert Maynard Leonard.
 
Leonard was a prolific journalist and editor of volumes of poetry for the Oxford University Press, who also published the present volume for Williams. Correspondence between Leonard and Williams, including Leonard’s parodying of Williams’s verse, is held at both the Bodleian Library and the Wade Center.
 
Charles Williams, best known as a central member of the Inklings with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, was a poet, novelist, theologian and literary critic. It is the last of these he turns to in the present work, assessing the poetic output of eighteen modern poets, including T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, W.B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy.