Poems.

First trade edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the poet on the half-title: "To Sir Noel Paton, with friendly regards, D. G. Rossetti, April 1870." A Scottish artist, Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901) shared many of the same aesthetic ideals as Rossetti and his circle. While studying at the Royal Academy in 1843, he was invited by John Everett Millais to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; though he declined, his painting was greatly influenced by their style, particularly in its historical accuracy and "minutely observed natural detail" (ODNB). He attended John Ruskin's 1853 Edinburgh lectures and later made several attempts to have Rossetti's paintings exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. He particularly praised Rossetti's Dante's Dream as "among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world". Poems was Rossetti's first commercially published collection of original verse. Its extraordinary genesis need only be briefly recalled: after Elizabeth Siddal's death in 1862, Rossetti placed the manuscripts of many of his poems in her coffin; in 1869, as he prepared the collection for publication, they were exhumed from her grave in Highgate Cemetery. The volume opens with "The Blessed Damozel", perhaps his most famous poem, and also includes "Dante at Verona", "A Last Confession", "My Sister's Sleep", and several early sonnets. The edition is "perhaps most remarkable for being one of the first books to be designed throughout by an author". Over nine months, Rossetti supervised the proofs while painstakingly designing the covers and endpapers. The result had a considerable influence on writers and designers of the 1880s; Oscar Wilde's Poems (1881) and several of Walter Pater's books were clearly modelled on Rossetti's volume (Stetz & Lasner, p. 32). This copy is in an early state of the binding, before the spine was recut, with an unsigned gathering bound at the rear. Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde, 1989. Octavo. With 4 pp. of publisher's advertisements at rear. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, spine and covers elaborately decorated in gilt, illustrated endpapers, untrimmed edges. Book label of William A. Strutz (1934-2024). Binding bright, small bumps to extremities, inner hinges repaired, a very good copy. …