First US edition, first printing, presentation copy of Hughes's first book inscribed to the poet and actress Isabella Gardner on the title page, "To Isabella Gardner with good wishes Ted Hughes." Gardner (1915-1981) was the Massachusetts-born great-niece of the important Boston art collector Isabella Stuart Gardner (1840-1924) and the cousin of the poet Robert Lowell. She studied acting at the Leighton Rollins School of Acting and the Embassy School of Acting in London, before moving to Chicago, where she edited the Poetry magazine from 1952 to 1956 under Karl Shapiro. Her fourth husband was the poet Allen Tate. She published four poetry collections in her lifetime, Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), The Looking Glass (1961), West of Childhood (1965) and That Was Then (1980). Here biography, Not at All What Once is used To: The Life and Time of Isabella Gardner, by Marian Janssen, was published in 2010. Sylvia Plath herself is noted to have considered Gardner a rival to the title "Poetess of America" (Journals, ed. Hughes & McCullough, p.211). Somewhat suggestively, Hughes has added, in pencil, his address while staying in Boston to the rear free endpaper, "Ted Hughes, Suite 61, 9 Willow St, Boston 8 -".
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