Whether a Dove or Seagull. Poems. WARNER (Sylvia Townsend) and ACKLAND (Valentine).

First UK Edition. 8vo. [218 x 145 x 25 mm]. [3]ff, 155pp. Bound in the publisher's khaki cloth, printed blue paper label tipped-in at the back. In the original printed green dust-wrapper (short tears at the head with small losses).
London: Chatto and Windus, 1934.

A very good clean copy, with just a little spotting around the edges. The label intended for the spine (and a spare) remain unattached and are tipped-in at the back. The dust-wrapper has not been price clipped. It was originally priced at 6s and Stephen Clark paid 2s 6d for this copy at Wells in 1957.

This first UK edition was preceded by the first US edition of 1933, but both are rare, and this one comes with a key at the end assigning authorship to the individual poems. 54 were by Warner and 55 by her lover and long term partner Ackland. ODNB notes it did little to enhance their careers but "it constituted an interesting experiment in presentation, along the lines of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's jointly published Lyrical Ballads. In the melding together of the two writers' work [...] Warner and Ackland made a gesture against "the frame of mind which judges a poem by looking to see who wrote it". [...] At the same time anonymity afforded them considerable licence, and the collection is remarkable for its love poems, many of which were so sexually explicit as to pass contemporary reviewers without comment".

Stock no. ebc7903