Gavin Ewart's Copy
GREVILLE, Fulke; Thom GUNN (edited with an introduction by). Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. 1968.
8vo. Original blue cloth, the spine lettered in gilt to gilt-bordered lettering piece, in the unclipped dustwrapper priced 21s / £1.05 net to front flap; pp. 159, [1]; wrapper spine and margins a little toned with a little edgewear; a fine copy in a near fine jacket.
A sharp first edition (Gavin Ewart’s copy) of Thom Gunn’s seminal selection of Greville’s poems.
It was for his various roles as “Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, [and] Friend to Sir Philip Sidney” (his self-composed epitaph) that Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke wished to be remembered. All of the relatively small body of writings he left behind were published posthumously, including his Life of Sidney, still his best-known work (written as a dedicatory introduction to an edition of his own poems and plays which never materialised). It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, and the heroic editorial work of Geoffrey Bullough, whose impeccably prepared 1938 two-volume edition of the works brought Greville to the attention of a new readership, that these strange, “difficult”, poems began to attract the attention they deserve.
Thom Gunn’s selection, made for Faber in 1968 and based on Bullough’s text, further widened Greville’s audience. The volume centres upon Caelica, Greville’s great sequence of 109 poems all of which is printed here. The poems were revised and reordered over decades, but the early lyrics were likely written in dialogue with Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, while the later poems eloquently speak with, and of, the disillusionments of experience and age, ending with a group of labyrinthine, gravely confessional, religious poems which belong with the greatest poems of the period. Gunn’s penetrating and helpful introduction – a poet’s introduction – remains one of the best introductory essays to poet and poems. The volume was published on September 30, 1968, in an edition of 4,000 copies.
Provenance: From the library of the English poet, Gavin Ewart (1916-1995), with his ownership name and date (January 1969) neatly in blue ink to the front free endpaper.
Bixby B28.
SKU: 2123089