Poems. [1918]

HOPKINS, Gerard Manley (1844-1889). Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, [1918].

First edition, limited to 750 copies, of the first published collection of Hopkins’s poems - copiously annotated. Unread except by a small coterie of friends during his lifetime, Hopkins's poetry ‘with its religious faith, his experiments in versification, his “dark night of the soul” would have reduced all his Victorian contemporaries to immediate insignificance […] had they but known of him’ (Connolly). The editor, Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, was a close friend of the author from their undergraduate years at Oxford, and was made Hopkins’s literary executor after his death. Writing to A.E. Housman shortly before publication, Bridges wrote: ‘the book will be one of the queerest in the world, but it is full of genius and poetic beauty and will find its place.’ The annotations, very likely by a Jesuit priest whose initials are accompanied by S. J., probably ‘Societatis Jesu’, carefully mark the metre, refer poems to various biographic moments or episodes in Hopkins’s correspondence, establish comparisons and references to several classics of English poetry, revealing a committed and deeply immersed reader whose exercise involved the contemporaneous handling of several reference works. Connolly The Modern Movement No.33; Hayward 335.

Octavo (190 x 119mm) half-title, 2 photogravure portraits by Emery Walker, 2 double-page facsimiles; manuscript index on paper pasted on rear free end-paper. Contemporary blue cloth, flat spine lettered in gilt (minor rubbing to spine ends). Provenance: probably a Jesuit priest (inscription ‘Ad usum D.F.H.S.J.’ to front free endpaper), with his many annotations in pencil throughout, and manuscript index in ink at end.

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