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"What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hoverer around our happy pillows!"
Poems
John Keats, 1817
Details
Poems
John Keats, 1817
KEATS, John (1795-1821). Poems. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817.
First edition of Keats’s first published book. Dedicated to Leigh Hunt, it features many of Keats’s most significant early works, including “I stood tiptoe on a little hill...,” “To Hope,” “Sleep and Poetry,” three verse epistles, plus 17 sonnets and other works. Among the sonnets is “On first looking into Chapman's Homer,” often regarded as Keats's first major poem. As Sidney Colvin remarks, the book “is full of immaturities, but also of buoyancy and promise; striking the note of rebellion against the poetical methods and conventions of the eighteenth century more vigorously than it had been struck since the publication of the 'Lyrical ballads' twenty years before...” (DNB). While it received favourable notices from some critics, the book was a dismal commercial failure and the publishers claimed to have found it necessary to refund some dissatisfied purchasers. Its dedication to Hunt ultimately helped turn critical opinion against Keats as a member of the "Cockney school" of poetry. Ashley III, p. 9; Hayward 231; MacGillivray 1.
Octavo (172 x 100mm). Half-title, title with wood-engraved bust of Spenser. 19th-century green morocco gilt, uncut (a little surface wear at joints). Provenance: James Lorimer Graham (1835-1876, American Consul in Florence; bookplate).
John Keats, 1817
KEATS, John (1795-1821). Poems. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817.
First edition of Keats’s first published book. Dedicated to Leigh Hunt, it features many of Keats’s most significant early works, including “I stood tiptoe on a little hill...,” “To Hope,” “Sleep and Poetry,” three verse epistles, plus 17 sonnets and other works. Among the sonnets is “On first looking into Chapman's Homer,” often regarded as Keats's first major poem. As Sidney Colvin remarks, the book “is full of immaturities, but also of buoyancy and promise; striking the note of rebellion against the poetical methods and conventions of the eighteenth century more vigorously than it had been struck since the publication of the 'Lyrical ballads' twenty years before...” (DNB). While it received favourable notices from some critics, the book was a dismal commercial failure and the publishers claimed to have found it necessary to refund some dissatisfied purchasers. Its dedication to Hunt ultimately helped turn critical opinion against Keats as a member of the "Cockney school" of poetry. Ashley III, p. 9; Hayward 231; MacGillivray 1.
Octavo (172 x 100mm). Half-title, title with wood-engraved bust of Spenser. 19th-century green morocco gilt, uncut (a little surface wear at joints). Provenance: James Lorimer Graham (1835-1876, American Consul in Florence; bookplate).
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Heather Weintraub
Specialist, Books, Manuscripts, & Archives