PBA Galleries

5 volumes. First Editions. Includes:

• The Triumph of Music and Other Lyrics. (Small 8vo), original pictorial wrappers. One of 500 copies. Closed tear to top edge of page opposite title; near fine. [Louisville, Kentucky:] John P. Morton, 1888.
• Accolon of Gaul With Other Poems. (8vo), original green cloth, gilt lettering, top edge gilt. Fine. First Edition. Louisville: John P. Morton, 1889.
• A Voice on the Wind and Other Poems. With title page vignette. (8vo), white half cloth, blue boards, printed paper label, dust jacket. Light wear to binding and jacket; near fine. First Edition. Louisville: John P. Morton, 1902. 
•  The Vale of Tempe: Poems. (8vo), white parchment spine, blue boards, gilt lettering, dust jacket. A presentation copy inscribed in ink on the front free endpaper to Cawein’s fellow Ohio Valley author “W. H. Venable / with friendship / and regard, / Madison Cawein / Louisville, Ky. / May, 1909." One of 600 copies. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905.
• The Poet and Nature and The Morning Road. (8vo), green cloth with gilt lettered spine. Some offsetting from an early clipping on the front paste-down. John P. Morton, [1914].

Madison Julius Cawein was a poet from Louisville, Kentucky. In 1913, a year before his death, Cawein published a poem called "Waste Land" in a Chicago magazine which included Ezra Pound as an editor. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration to T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 and considered the birth of modernism poetry. Although Cawein gained an international reputation, he has been eclipsed as the genre of poetry in which he worked became increasingly outmoded.