Archibald MacLeish. First Edition, sixth impression (stated). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company and Riverside Press, 1934. The unclipped dust jacket, in a mylar protective wrapper, has the original price $2.50 on inside flap, and is in a Very Good condition. There is some toning on jacket and the back top has a piece missing. There is also a small tear at top of front jacket. Hardcover is burnt orange cloth with a silver emblem on the cover, and in Very Good+ condition. There is foxing on inside front/back covers but all pages are in great shape. No writing or markings in the book, 114 pp. Has a folding map of the "Route of the Conquistadors" at back of book which is in Near Fine condition.
In "Montezuma, Cortez, and Diaz, the poem offers three figures—god, hero, and man—who share the reader’s attention and good will and who are examined in an ironic context of human blood and natural beauty, greed for gold and sun-worship, political intrigue and heroic quest. Seeing the poem wholly through its narrator, Diaz, Allen Tate praised the poem for its “finely sustained tone,” its “clarity of sensuous reminiscence,” and its “technical perfection,” but found in its sentimentality “one of the examples of our modern sensibility at its best; it has the defect of its qualities,” as Tate recorded in Essays of Four Decades."
First published by a Houghton Mifflin in 1932. MacLeish's epic poem won him a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1933, his first of three!
The front flap of the first edition dust jacket has a five-line blurb by Ernest Hemingway, in praise of this title. Printed in an edition of 1000 copies. The sixth impression, though, is missing this.
