- 109
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 USD
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Description
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe
- Epipsychidion: Verses addressed to the to the noble and unfortunate Lady V__... London: C and J Ollier, 1821.
- Paper, ink, leather
8vo (218 x 132 mm). Half-title present. Full gilt brown morocco by Bradstreet.
first edition, one of 100 copies, presentation from the poet Richard Chenevix Trench
Rare. This work was inspired by Shelley's meeting, at the end of October 1820 when the author had moved back to Pisa, the beautiful, young Teresa Viviani (1801--1836), who was being kept in a convent awaiting the outcome of marriage arrangements in which she played little part. But it also reflects the difficulties he was facing in his second marriage to Mary Godwin, and looks back to the desolation the poet faced after the suicide of his first wife Harriet Westbrook. This poem was published anonymously, "for the esoteric few." "It would give me no pleasure," Shelley added, "that the vulgar should read it."
"A masterpiece that can still disconcert as its couplets waver unstably and yet valuably between the spiritual and the sexual, the allegorical and the literal, the erotic and the political, devotion to one figure and advocacy of free love" (Micahel O'Neill, Oxford DNB)
first edition, one of 100 copies, presentation from the poet Richard Chenevix Trench
Rare. This work was inspired by Shelley's meeting, at the end of October 1820 when the author had moved back to Pisa, the beautiful, young Teresa Viviani (1801--1836), who was being kept in a convent awaiting the outcome of marriage arrangements in which she played little part. But it also reflects the difficulties he was facing in his second marriage to Mary Godwin, and looks back to the desolation the poet faced after the suicide of his first wife Harriet Westbrook. This poem was published anonymously, "for the esoteric few." "It would give me no pleasure," Shelley added, "that the vulgar should read it."
"A masterpiece that can still disconcert as its couplets waver unstably and yet valuably between the spiritual and the sexual, the allegorical and the literal, the erotic and the political, devotion to one figure and advocacy of free love" (Micahel O'Neill, Oxford DNB)
Provenance
Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench (1820's presentation on half-title); Thomas Jefferson McKee (bookplate, sale, Anderson Galleries, 3 December 1901, lot 5446)
Literature
Wise, Ashley Library V, p.77; Granniss 62