The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr Edmond Spenser… from the library of John Keats, $47,500 (£37,000) at Freeman’s Hindman.
This remarkable association copy, signed to the title page John Keats, Severn’s Gift, 1818, brings together Keats’ greatest single artistic influence and the man who cared for him in his final days.
It was Charles Cowden Clarke’s reading of Spenser’s Epithalamion to the 18-year-old Keats that is said to have awakened his genius and inspired his earliest writings, the author later recalling that Keats consumed Spenser’s Faerie Queene “like a young horse ramping through a spring meadow”.
Severn accompanied Keats to Rome in 1820 in the hope that a warm climate might cure his lingering illness, his letters and journal the primary historical source for biographers of Keats’ last days. He is buried next to Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
Keats - who asked in his will that his library be shared among his friends - is known to have owned at least one other collected works of Spenser (a gift from his brother George in 1816 it is now at Harvard University).
Long provenance
Offered by Freeman’s Hindman with a guide of $50,000-80,000, The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr Edmond Spenser… has a full 20th century provenance and was offered with a letter from rare book dealer Frank T Sabin to the bibliophile A Edward Newton, dated March 27, 1914, reading: “John Keats, who stands himself, in the realm of poetry, next to the great Elizabethans. Spenser’s Fairy Queen first fired his ambition to write poetry…”
The bookplates of Newton, Lucius Wilmerding and Sol Feinstone are pasted into the copy that hammered down just shy of estimate at $47,500 (£37,000).
