Edith Sitwell – Poor Men’s Music – SIGNED First Edition 1950 – Dame Patricia Routledge’s Copy, with Her Manuscript Elocution Notebook

A first edition published by Fore Publications, London, in 1950. Number one in the ‘Key Poets’ series. 24 pages. SIGNED by Edith Sitwell in blue ink to the half-title. Original salmon-pink printed card covers, showing some dust marking, light rubbing and edge wear, with rust staining around the staples. A very good copy.

From the collection of Dame Patricia Routledge, accompanied by her early elocution exercise book, labelled in her hand “K. P. Routledge / Elocution (practical) / 9.4.48”. Bound in burgundy covers with a cloth spine, showing rubbing and wear to the extremities.

The notebook contains handwritten transcriptions including Sitwell’s ‘Still Falls the Rain’, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’ and passages from John Masefield’s ’The Trial of Jesus’, together with phonetic transcriptions, pencil annotations and critical notes. Accompanied by printed Guildhall School of Music and Drama elocution examination papers.

An evocative record of Routledge’s early study of speech, poetry and dramatic delivery, preserved alongside a signed work by one of the poets she studied.

Provenance: The Dame Patricia Routledge Collection; Stride & Son, 29 July 2026, lot 430.