SELECTED POEMS; With Illustrations and Decorations by Harry Clarke, and an Introduction by Humbert Wolfe

London, England: John Lane, 1928. Hardcover. Very Good. Harry Clarke. Octavo, 9.6 in. x 6.1 in., pp. xxx, [4], 217. Illustrated with frontis and nine other tissue-guarded engravings, and many line drawn "decorations", by Harry Clarke. Dark blue cloth boards with gilt title and Harry Clarke drawing to front and to spine. Untrimmed fore- and bottom edges. Bottom corners nudged. Edgewear and chips to cloth at top/bottom of spine. Lovely, decorative endpapers. Inscription and two previous owners' signatures to front flyleaf. Front hinge a bit tender. Protected in mylar. "Algernon Charles Swinburne [1837-1909] was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He was the author of several novels, and contributed the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909. "Swinburne was born into an old aristocratic family. He was sent to Eton, where he acquired a taste for flagellation, and Oxford, where he became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, of which he was briefly a member. His second volume of poetry, a drama in classical style, brought him praise.

"His next two volumes, Poems and Ballads (1866), were heavily influenced by de Sade, Baudelaire, and the French symbolists. This work was reviled by critics, most famously by Robert Buchanan, who attacked Swinburne and Rossetti in "The Fleshly School of Poetry," though it influenced contemporaries like Wilde and Yeats and modernists such as Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Swinburne suffered a breakdown in the 1870s but continued to write, in genres ranging from lyric poetry and satire to pornography, for the remainder of his life. Much of his work remains unpublished." (from AllPoetry)

Illustrator Henry Patrick Clarke (1889 - 1931) was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. His work was influenced by both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements.