DOUGLAS, Lord Alfred. Lyrics. Inscribed by the poet. London: Rich and Cowan, 1935.
8vo., blue cloth, embossed with device to upper board, gilt to spine; in the matching jacket; upper edge blue, else untrimmed; pp. vi, 3-110, [ii]; slightly sunned to lower edge, else a near-fine copy, many of the pages entirely unopened, in the very good, unclipped jacket (7/6 net), which is nicked to head of spine, and slightly dulled to backstrip/folds.
First edition, inscribed by the poet to the front free endpaper: "Inscribed for G. Catalani by Alfred Douglas. April 1937."
Most of Douglas's homoerotic poetry was written between 1893 and 1896 and appeared in undergraduate literary journals such as The Spirit Lamp, which he edited, and The Chameleon, or in small-circulation magazines like The Artist. Some of these poems appeared in a French edition of Douglas's verse in 1896, but most were not republished until the Lyrics of 1935, along with a companion volume of Sonnets, which appeared in the same year.
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