[Patric Dickinson, poet, translator and broadcaster.] Copy of his poetry collection 'The Scale of Things', filled with explanatory annotations by him for his mistress Sarah Hamilton.

Patric Dickinson has not received his due. A self-styled ‘poet and impresario of poetry’, Dickinson occupied a central position in the cultural landscape of post-war Britain. As an editor and broadcaster he worked with poets such as Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Roy Campbell, actresses Flora Robson, Peggy Ashcroft and Jill Balcon, and actors Robert Donat, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud. See his 1965 autobiography 'The Good Minute' and John Mole’s obituary in the Independent, 31 January 1994. From the papers of Dickinson’s mistress Sarah Emmeline Hamilton. (His extraordinary correspondence with her, including 171 original and mostly-unpublished poems, 474 autograph letters and 349 post cards, is offered separately). The present item is 39+[1]pp, 8vo. In light-grey boards printed in red, in similar dustwrapper. In good condition, aged and a little discoloured, in worn and aged dustwrapper. There are expalantory notes in ink to sixteen of the poems, ranging from a few words, to (for 'The Fossil Bird'), 'This came from finding a vertebra of an ichtyosaurus on the beach at Lyme Regis. I tuned the fish-lizard into a bird-creature. / 'Poe's raven' fr. the poem 'The Raven' / 'I grow old . . . is fr. Eliot. The idea being to link up all time - stone - clocks - now - ideas -'; and (to 'At the Villa Nelle'), 'A good joke about the intellectuals. So good that Stephen Spender dared not print it in Encounter, as a poem, but put it headed 'Dear Sir' in the Letters.'