Monday, May 10, 2021

Lillygay: an Anthology of Anonymous Poems (1920)


Yesterday I took a break from writing my bi-monthly previews to research Lillygay: an Anthology of Anonymous Poems (1920) towards a similarly subtitled project I might one day abandon. Apart from the usual online retailers, not much is out there on this book. There is, however, a short Wikipedia page on the book's editor, Victor Neuberg, along with a description of Neuberg by his friend, Aleister Crowley. 

He was an agnostic, a vegetarian, a mystic, a Tolstoyan, and several other things all at once. He endeavoured to express his spiritual state by wearing the green star of Esperanto, though he could not speak the language; by refusing to wear a hat, even in London, to wash, and to wear trousers. Whenever addressed, he wriggled convulsively, and his lips, which were three times too large for him, and had been put on hastily as an afterthought, emitted the most extraordinary laugh that had ever come my way; to these advantages he united those of being extraordinarily well-read, overflowing with exquisitely subtle humour, and being one of the best natured people that ever trod this planet. --- Aleister Crowley, The Spirit of Solitude (1920). Chapters 62-63



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