The Collected Poems

London: Philip Lee Warner, Publisher to the Medici Society, 1919. First thus. Near Fine. One of 1,000 copies printed by C.T Jacobi at the Chiswick Press and published for the Medici Society by Philip Lee Warner. Contemporary half red calf over marbled boards ruled in gilt. Quarto. x, 156, [1, colophon] pp. With a woodcut title-page and frontisportrait of Brooke by G. Raverat. Gilt-titled spine in six compartments. Some wear to edges of boards. Top edge gilt. Mid-twentieth century bookplate to upper pastedown. Slight toning to edges of endpapers. Otherwise fine and fresh throughout. An attractive, Near Fine copy.

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915) (truncated) is best remembered for his wartime sonnets that celebrated the mythic image of the heroic soldier. Brooke's "elegy to England," his 1914 poem "The Soldier," "was probably the best-known sonnet published in English in the twentieth century" (ODNB). Brooke died at sea en route to Gallipoli just a few months after enlisting, and most of his poetry was published posthumously in two editions: 1914 and other Poems (1915) and his Collected Poems (1918). The present edition finely reprints the 1918 collection. Near Fine. (Inventory #: 7043)