This poetry collection was drawn to my attention a couple of weeks ago when Mr TjZ sent an email containing photos of a copy he’d recently discovered. Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley was published by George Bell and Sons in 1902. The samples shown here are from a 1907 reprint, a “cheaper reissue” according to the print details which may explain why there’s so much print-through on the obverse side of the illustrated pages. I like Shelley’s poetry, and I like Robert Anning Bell’s illustrations; the pair work well together in this volume which looking back I see posted a link to years ago when writing about Bell’s illustrated edition of The Tempest.
The Shelley book may be a cheap reissue but several of the major poems still use red ink to highlight titles or illustrative details. The collection contains a number of Shelley’s longer works, opening with Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, a poem that always makes me think of Aleister Crowley. John Symonds in The Great Beast relates that Shelley was one of Crowley’s favourite poets, and that Crowley often identified himself in a pompously romantic fashion with Alastor, even though for most of his life the Beast was seldom without an attendant “Scarlet Woman” or a company of acolytes. Symonds nevertheless refers to Crowley as “Alastor” throughout his biography.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aleister Crowley: Wandering The Waste
• Robert Anning Bell’s Herodias
• The Tempest illustrated
• Book-plates of To-day
• Robert Anning Bell’s Tempest
Anning Bell’s 1895 take on Midsummer Night’s Dream is also stellar but doesn’t appear to be online at my cursory glance…
His portraits therein of Oberon remind one of Oscar Wilde which adds to the general aesthetic frisson.