William Carlos Williams. Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

Boston: The Four Seas Co., 1920.

4to.; original boards; frontispiece by Stuart Davis; ex-libris stamp of Bruce Humphries Publishers on front free endpaper; top of spine bumped, some light wear to the tip and edges. 

First edition of 1,000 copies, the full edition.

First published in 1920, Kora in Hell: Improvisations is the first of a series of remarkable books which can best be described as experiments and affirmations of the writing act, improvisational texts through which Williams sought to establish a “poetics” of writing. Williams called Kora “an opening of the doors,” and certainly the work that came of it, immediately in the 1920s, and throughout the rest of his writing life, would follow this key book, this “secret document.” And he also thought of it as a “wonder” because he had no book in mind when he first sat down to write something daily for a year, simply for the sake of writing. This is the key discovery which makes Kora a central document in Williams’s beginnings as a modernist writer.