[Rarebooks] fa: POEMS OF M'DONALD CLARKE the "MAD POET OF BROADWAY" - 1836

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 19th-century American literature and  
history, auctions ending Sunday, May 8. More details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Poems of M'Donald Clarke. NY: J.W. Bell, 1836. FIRST EDITION.  
Hardcover 8vo in original[?] pebbled cloth, gilt titles to front  
cover; vi, [7]-288 p.; engraved portrait frontispiece.
Uncommon first edition of this eccentric collection of poems by the  
very eccentric McDonald Clarke (1798-1842), self-described "Mad Poet"  
of Broadway, humorist, sentimentalist, pavement balladeer, would-be  
Byron, habitué of Grace Church, scourge of fashionable society, butt  
of jokes, "a poet of the order of Nat Lee, one of those wits in whose  
heads... genius is divided from madness by a thin partition." An early  
example of the "outsider artist," Clarke was an influence on Walt  
Whitman, who eulogized him shortly after his death: "We always, on  
perusing Clarke's pieces, felt, in the chambers of the mind within us,  
a moving and responding, as of harp cords, struck by the wind."