POEMS
London and New York: George Routledge and Sons, [1870]. Hardcover. New Edition, a reissue of the 1857 Edward Moxon edition. Printed by R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor in London. Octavo: xiii, [3], 375, [1] pp. with the frontispiece portrait, a steel engraving by W.H. Mote, and 54 textual illustrations, all wood engravings. In the publisher's deluxe dark green crushed morocco binding, with rounded boards, five raised bands, a black-stamped ruled surround, and gilt-stamped ornamental borders, decorations, and titling. All edges gilt, with marbled endpapers and two royal blue silk ribbons. Light foxing, with a period ink gift inscription (1878) to a prefatory blank leaf. Occasional hint of rubbing along the extremities of the boards. A sumptuous production. Provenance: from the Publishers' Bookbindings collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin.
"More than any other Victorian-era writer, Tennyson has seemed the embodiment of his age, both to his contemporaries and to modern readers. In his own day he was said to be - with Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone - one of the three most famous living persons, a reputation no other poet writing in English has ever had. As official poetic spokesman for the reign of Victoria, he felt called upon to celebrate a quickly changing industrial and mercantile world with which he felt little in common, for his deepest sympathies were called forth by an unaltered rural England; the conflict between what he thought of as his duty to society and his allegiance to the eternal beauty of nature seems peculiarly Victorian. Even his most severe critics have always recognized his lyric gift for sound and cadence, a gift probably unequaled in the history of English poetry" (Poetry Foundation). Item #78864
Price: $500.00