Book, The Ghost in the Underblows by Alfred Young Fisher

This is a Book. It was designed by Alvin Lustig. It is dated 1940 and we acquired it in 1993. Its medium is lithography in orange and black ink on off-white wove paper. It is a part of the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.

This object was donated by Tamar Cohen. It is credited Gift of Tamar Cohen and Dave Slatoff.

Its dimensions are

H x W: 23.9 x 31.5 cm (9 7/16 x 12 3/8 in.)

It is inscribed

Printed in black ink, left: Called second, war floated across the sun./The numbering of men began, and/(Like critics who rush ‘classics’ to their side)/All nations found blind justice blinded to their cause./How flags go up along the unmusical streets/And noise makes tom-tom in the heart, and feet/Keep time to the hearts and hearts to the beat/Of winged words! How worlds stand round/Rating their chances on a controlled wheel!/War floats across the sun and fire splatters out/Like slag from an incandescent crucible;/Down in the brain the heat melts out/Pain and impure steel. But when it cools/There is stone, with its great way of staying;/A little crumbling while, a little while./Down in the skull things shape/Over hills and valleys, over which there go/Soft waters, large-eyed cattle, Thestylis and Corydon,/ And enchanted April weather when the moon/Bewitches all the air…And there go/The cohorts and the dragging guns, men/Pulling their outrooted hearts as one pulls/A primitive plow through land clodded with bones./I hear the steady silence and prayers of those men,/Levites who are for ever apart./There might be sun for a little while in the brain/Did not again the fog creep down from heaven/And rise from rotten lands. Imperceptibly across/The sun floats fog, and stumbling,/Blind and death-creating ways begin again./O, how do worlds and days go with it/And prophets make and make their comfortable lies!/When occurrence fronts them like their own hands/When they are sprawled in easy chairs,/Their own hands, upon which looking there are different marks,/The whorls and tendrils never the same but still/a commonness about it all, enough/34.

Cite this object as