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Hopkins (Gerard Manley) Poems

Hopkins (Gerard Manley) Poems,

edited by Robert Bridges, first edition, 2 portraits, small ownership inscription on front free endpaper, original cloth-backed plain boards, light soiling, minor browning, spine label with light scratches and minor marks, rubbed at corner tips, 8vo, 1918.

***One of only 750 copies. "Robert Bridges...on whom the poet had relied to keep, treasure, and conceivably publish the poems after Hopkins's death, believed that they must be printed, and was soon planning an edition with a short memoir. Delay was caused by his respect for the private nature of the letters, by his feeling that Hopkins's melancholia should not be publicly exposed, and by fear that the public would not understand the peculiarities of the verse. He gradually introduced small groups of the poems into anthologies, but it was not until 1916 that he received the public encouragement for which he was waiting. The sensitive, handsome, and almost complete small edition, edited and largely designed by Bridges, was published at the end of 1918." (DNB).