SELECTED POEMS

First edition, first printing. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to a gilt-ruled black label to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean throughout. In the near fine dustwrapper, a touch of rubbing to spine tips, the merest toning to the spine, with a light stain to the lower edge of the rear flap fold. Not price-clipped, the original 21s price abraded, however, by the removal of a later price label. A lovely copy.

"Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, Friend to Sir Philip Sidney" reads the epitaph Greville wrote for himself. During his life, and for most of his afterlife, he has been discussed in relation to one or other of these figures, his best known work still perhaps his prose 'Life' of Sidney, itself a curious hybrid of biography, Elizabethan history, and autobiography, written in the shadows during James' darker reign (it was written as a dedicatory introduction to projected edition of his own writings) written in the shadow of James. None of his writings were published during his long life. Thom Gunn's groundbreaking selection centres upon 'Caelica', the sequence of 109 poems shaped over many decades, which it incudes in its entirety. Comparable to Sidney's 'Astrophil and Stella' in length, and clearly written with his friend's sequence in mind (the early poems probably written in tandem), Greville's sequence begins with love poems in a broadly Petrarchan mode and ends with a series of anguished, deeply personal, religious poems, the latter some of the finest, and darkest, English poems of the period. The volume concludes with extracts from Greville's poetic treatises and closet dramas, while Gunn's introduction remains as fresh and insightful as ever. Published September 30, 1968, 4,000 copies were printed. (Hagstrom and Bixby B28).