From the library of the poet credited with introducing the Rossettis to Keats 28 KEATS, John. Poems. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817 £40,000 [ 159970 ]
his armorial bookplate: a doctor, author, and inventor (most notably of the weather forecasting device known as the Tempest Prognosticator which caused a sensation
Octavo (161 × 195 mm). Near- contemporary purple calf, spine lettered direct in gilt, floral tool to compartments, decorative panels to sides with concentric borders of dog-tooth rolls, rules, and palmette frame in blind, vine shoot roll in gilt, marbled endpapers and edges. Housed in a custom blue silk chemise and blue morocco slipcase. With the half-title. Wood engraving of Edmund Spenser on title page. Extremities lightly rubbed, occasional corrections and underlining to text, light manuscript notes on final blank. A fine copy, very attractively bound. ¶ Ashley Library III, p. 9; Hayward 231; MacGillivray A1. Sidney Colvin, Life of John Keats , 2018; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, His Family Letters With a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti , 1895. Provenance: i) Robert Calder Campbell, with his ownership inscription dated 1824 on the first blank. A soldier-poet who retired from the Indian army in 1839, he contributed to literary annuals and published three volumes of poems, a novel, and his memoirs. “He was a lively writer in a minor way, an amusing chatty talker, who had seen many things here and there, and knew something of the publishing world, and a straightforward, most unassuming gentleman, whose society could do nothing but good to a youth like Rossetti” (Rossetti, pp. 110–11); ii) George Merryweather (1794–1870), with
First edition of Keats’s first book, from the library of the poet Robert Calder Campbell, an early literary mentor to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and responsible for the cult of Keats among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The best-known poem in the book is the sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration” (Colvin, p. 89), and described as “an astonishing achievement, with a confident formal assurance and metaphoric complexity which make it one of the finest English sonnets. As Hunt generously acknowledged, it ‘completely announced the new poet taking possession’” ( ODNB ). The first of a mere three lifetime publications, Poems was published on 3 March 1817 by Charles and James Ollier, who were already publishing Shelley. Keats had appeared for the first time in print less than a year earlier, with a poem in the radical weekly The Examiner on 5 May 1816. Poems attracted a few admiring reviews but these were followed by the first of several harsh attacks by the influential Blackwood’s Magazine , mainly by critics who resented Keats’s avowed kinship with the despised Leigh Hunt.
when it was displayed in the 1851 Great Exhibition); iii) Natalie Knowlton Blair (1887–1951), with her morocco booklabel (her sale, 3 December 2004, lot 181a).
SIXTY FINE ITEMS
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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