Poems; Edited by Robert Bridges
London: [Oxford University Press for] Humphrey Milford, 1918. 8vo. [8], 124 pages. 2 portraits engravings under tissue by Emery Walker, 2 double–page facsimiles of autograph poems, and 2 in–text facsimiles of the author’s signature. Original holland-backed boards, printed paper spine label, untrimmed. Spine label rubbed and chipped at edges, spine toned, a few stains on covers, pale stain along extreme upper margins of text leaves, otherwise generally clean and fresh internally. Item #409935
First edition, limited to 750 copies, of Hopkins’ first published collection of work. Unread except by a small coterie of friends during his lifetime, “Hopkins’s poetry with its religious faith, his experiments in versification, his ‘dark night of the soul’ would have reduced all his Victorian contemporaries to immediate insignificance – like Rimbaud’s in France – had they but known of him” (Connolly, The Modern Movement 33).
Price: $3,000.00