Poems from the Pacific, The West's Reply to England's Laureate
San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1888.
First Edition. 172 pp, in original cloth, decorated in gilt and black, with publisher's review slip tipped in. Moderate edgewear, faint cup ring on front cover; very good.
Voldo was a traveling agent of the Puget Sound Co-Operative Colony, a utopian community established in Port Angeles, Washington in 1887, and served as one of the editors of the Colony newspaper, Model Commonwealth. In the preface to this collection of his poetry, he describes his work as a response to Tennyson's poem "Locksley Hall," which he reads as a condemnation of the modern world and a longing for a pastoral, pre-industrialized existence. Voldo, in contrast, sees civilization progressing toward "larger liberty, higher achievement, supremer happiness," via several different paths: "philanthropy, with love's lamp searching out the haunts of the wretched; legislation, seeking to be humane and just, protecting the weak, enlightening the dark, uplifting the oppressed; politics, exalting and expanding civilization; letters, reaching after hope, and strength, and joy; science, discovering the unity and completion of the race." OCLC locates no copies in Pacific Northwest institutions.
Item #19169
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