The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems

Edinburgh and London: Valde Books - Printed By Ballantyne, Hansen & Co., 2009. Trade Paperback. Very Good. 6" x 9. 150 Pages. This present Edition is a 2009 Valde Books reprint. Previously published was the 1858 First Edition, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (30 all told) London: Bell and Daldy. The 1875 Revised Edition, London Ellis and White, and the The Kelmscott Press Edition 1892. During the winter of 1855 William Morris (1834-1896), not yet twenty-one years old, began reading some of his first poems to his undergraduate friends at Oxford. In the course of the next hundred-odd years some of the best critics would delight in the purity of passion, energy, color, and enchantment they discovered in these poems. But on winter evenings in 1855 only a handful of young men at Oxford could testify to the fresh talent unfolding before them. One of them was R.W. Dixon, who intuited the stature of these poems after a single recitation. Dixon's response typifies the warmth and admiration that Morris' yet unpublished poetry inspired first among his undergraduate circle, then during 1857 among the Rossetti group in London. In this congenial environment and for close friends Morris wrote all thirty of these poems which he then published in 1858. Morris went on to be an English artist, writer, socialist and activist. He was one of the principal founders of the British arts and crafts movement, best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics, a writer of poetry and fiction and a pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain.