Poems

Lot 106
16.10.2025 10:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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$ 17 780
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1472029
Lot 106 | Poems
Estimate value
$ 12 000 – 18 000
KEATS, John (1795-1821). Poems. London: C. & J. Ollier, 1817.

First edition of Keats’s first published book, finely bound. Dedicated to Leigh Hunt, it features many of Keats’s most significant early works, including “I stood tiptoe on a little hill...,” “To Hope,” “Sleep and Poetry,” three verse epistles, plus 17 sonnets and other works. Among the sonnets is “On first looking into Chapman's Homer,” often regarded as Keats's first major poem. As Sidney Colvin remarks, the book “is full of immaturities, but also of buoyancy and promise; striking the note of rebellion against the poetical methods and conventions of the eighteenth century more vigorously than it had been struck since the publication of the 'Lyrical ballads' twenty years before...” (DNB). While it received favorable notices from some critics, the book was a dismal commercial failure and the publishers claimed to have found it necessary to refund some dissatisfied purchasers. Its dedication to Hunt ultimately helped turn critical opinion against Keats as a member of the "Cockney school" of poetry. Ashley III, p. 9; Hayward 231; MacGillivray 1.

Small octavo (168 x 100mm). Half-title, title with wood-engraved bust of Spenser. (Very light scattered foxing.) Full morocco gilt by Zaehnsdorf c.1916, inner dentelles, silk doublures, all edges gilt. Provenance: bookplate with Aubrey Beardsley illustration of a woman reading and initial "C".
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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