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DOUGLAS, Alfred, Lord. Lyrics.'Far Be It from Me to Run Down Oscar Wilde' Inscribed by Bosie DOUGLAS, Alfred, Lord. Lyrics. London: [Westminster Press for] Rich and Cowan. 1935. 8vo. Publisher's blue cloth, upper board stamped in blind, spine lettered in gilt, in the very good, unclipped blue green dust jacket (7 6 net), top edge stained blue, the others untrimmed, partially unopened; pp. ii, 110, [2]; frontispiece portrait of 'Lord Alfred Douglas in his 24th year'; a few nicks to
'Far Be It from Me to Run Down Oscar Wilde' - Inscribed by Bosie
DOUGLAS, Alfred, Lord. Lyrics. London: [Westminster Press for] Rich and Cowan. 1935.
8vo. Publisher's blue cloth, upper board stamped in blind, spine lettered in gilt, in the very good, unclipped blue-green dust-jacket (7/6 net), top-edge stained blue, the others untrimmed, partially unopened; pp. ii, 110, [2]; frontispiece portrait of 'Lord Alfred Douglas in his 24th year'; a few nicks to spine ends of jacket and to upper edges with corresponding sunning to cloth; slight offset to title; else a near-fine copy; front free endpaper inscribed 'Inscribed for G. Catalani by Alfred Douglas. April 1937' in green ink.
First edition thus of the collected lyric poetry of Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (1870–1945), a presentation copy 'inscribed for G. Catalani' in April 1937, containing the polemical 'Two Loves' used as evidence against Oscar Wilde in court and previously suppressed by the author.
Most of Douglas's homoerotic poetry was written between 1893 and 1896 and appeared in undergraduate literary journals such as The Spirit Lamp, which he edited, and The Chameleon, or in small-circulation magazines like The Artist. Some of these poems appeared in a French edition of Douglas's verse in 1896, but most were not republished until the present Lyrics of 1935, along with a companion volume of Sonnets, which appeared in the same year.
In contrast to the 'art-for-art's sake heresy […] promulgated by Oscar Wilde, who summed it up by saying that "in all art style is of more importance than sincerity", whereas I maintain that good poetry cannot be written without sincerity any more than it can be written without style […] Far be it for me to run down Oscar Wilde. I was the first to admire and pay homage to his genius and to put him in the very high place to which he belongs as a dramatist and a writer of prose […] Being essentially a great artist he lived to write one really great poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" [i.e. De Profundis], which is an answer to and an implicit repudiation of his own heresy' (pp. 5–6). This collection features Douglas's 1892 'Two Loves' (pp. 56–58), featuring the line 'I am the love that dare not speak its name', weaponised against Wilde (along with his letters to Bosie) in his trials for 'gross indecency', as well as Douglas's own 'De Profundis', 'published in Poems (Mercure de France edition, 1896) and suppressed by [Douglas] in all subsequent collections' (p. 59).
SKU: 2113572
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