The Morning of the Poem

N. Y.: Farrar Straus & Giroux, (1980). First edition of Schuyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, which was dedicated to the artist Darragh Park. Presentation copy, inscribed by Schuyler to Barbara Guest: "for Barbara all love Jimmy Feb. 1980". The Morning of the Poem, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 in part owing to the advocacy of John Ashbery, one of the judges, earned Schuyler a wider and more appreciative audience. A "poet of warm benediction and praise", Schuyler was "prone to psychotic fits (and) spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions". It is not therefore surprising that his poetry is devoted to the "celebration of ordinary pleasures." As Lehman further observes, "Like few other poets, he committed himself to the task of painting what's there and only what's there. In his poems accuracy of observation is raised to a high form of praise. The natural or manmade particulars of the world are celebrated not so much for their utility as for their virtue in merely being." - Lehman, p. 273. As Ashbery put it, "He makes sense, dammit, and he manages to do so without falsifying or simplifying the daunting complexity of life as we are living it today. Fine copy in slightly sunned jacket. 8vo, original cloth-backed boards, dust jacket. Fine copy in slightly sunned jacket.