Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Lot 237
09.12.2020 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 1 500
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 470307
Lot 237 | Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Estimate value
£ 1 500 – 2 000
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

1914 and other Poems. 1915

BROOKE, Rupert (1887-1915). 1914 and other Poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1915.



First edition of Brooke’s famous collection of poems, one of 1000 copies. Divided into four sections, it includes the much anthologised ‘The Soldier’: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’. Shortly after Brooke’s death in 1915, a tribute was published anonymously in The Times by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause, and a heart devoid of hate for his fellow-men’ (The Times, 26 April 1915). Keynes 6.



Octavo (190 x 128mm). Photogravure frontispiece portrait of the author, publisher’s 4pp. advertisement loosely inserted, additional spine label tipped-in on rear endpaper. Original publisher's cloth, paper spine label, printed dust-jacket (a few small stains to cloth, spine of dust-jacket very lightly browned with small chips at head and foot).

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