Evi Heinz

Combining poems Previously published in Prufrock and Other Observations (Egoist, 1917) and Poems (Hogarth Press, 1919) with some new work, Ara Vos Prec was T. S. Eliot’s Third Poetry Collection.

Nevertheless, it was also a first – for its Publisher JOhn Rodker, who printed the collection as the ‘first book’ of his Ovid Press in December 1919.¹

Although the book – with decorated Capitals and a Colophon device by Edward Wadsworth – is attractively designed, Rodker’s Lack of Experience as a Printer-Publisher showS.

from smudged type and Widely varying margins to an incorrectly bound signature – Ara Vos Prec is clearly the Work of an Apprentice rather than a master of the ‘Black Art’.

The Most egregious Error, however, a misprint in the name of the collection on the title Page (‘vus’ rather than ‘Vos’) was apparently Down to Eliot rather than Rodker.

In February 1936, Eliot wrote to Donald Gallup: ‘The correct title of the book is Ara Vos Prec. It only happened to be Vus on the title page because I don’t know Provençal, and i Was quoting from an Italian edition of Dante the editor of which apparently did not know Provençal either.’²

1. As Gerald Cloud Notes, the book was not issued until February 1920, though. Gerald W. Cloud, John Rodker’s Ovid Press: A Bibliographical History (Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2010), p. 70. ↩︎
2. Quoted in Donald gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 5. ↩︎