Beschreibung:

YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER ED. The Poems of William Blake . London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893. Inscribed in ink on the front endpaper "Mrs Shakespear,/from WB Yeats/February 1896". Original publisher's blue cloth gilt, protected in a modern clamshell case. 6 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches (16 x 9 cm); liii, 251 pp. Spine somewhat browned, light rubbing to binding, a sound copy with Omar Shakespear Pound's bookplate. Yeats had first met Olivia Shakespear, the novelist and patron of the arts, in 1894. In 1896, the year of this inscription, the relationship had become physically intimate; it was the thirty-year-old Yeats's first real amour, after his hopeless longings for Maud Gonne. Olivia was in a loveless marriage to the barrister Henry Hope Shakespear, and in 1886 had given birth to Dorothy Shakespear later to become the wife of Ezra Pound. While their physical relationship was short-lived, she remained a close friend to Yeats until her death in 1938. They shared a common interest in the occult, and in literature; but beyond that, she seems to have been a warm memory that Yeats carried with him, and he died the year after her. Of her he wrote in remembrance "She was not more lovely than distinguished-no matter what happened she never lost her solitude...For the moment I cannot bear the thought of London. I will find her memory everywhere." This copy has pencil notes in three places, probably by Olivia Shakespear. One quotes Wilde, another a quotation of Yeats "a brief forgiveness between opposites" (from Cuchullain's speech in On Baile's Strand). Provenance: W.B. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear; Olivia to her daughter Dorothy Shakespear; thence to Omar Shakespear Pound C Estate of Omar Shakespear Pound