[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS FLATMAN - POEMS AND SONGS - 1682

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 8. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/jw3ydoq

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Thomas Flatman: Poems and Songs. The Third Edition with Additions and Amendments. London: Printed for Benjamin Tooke, at the Ship in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1682. First edition thus. Early/period calf; 8vo; [48] + 170 + [4] pp.; with the errata, 3 pp. of publisher's adverts, and engraved portrait frontispiece. ESTC R37387; Wing F1153.

Binding somewhat worn and rubbed, spine darkened, joints cracked but both boards are secure; text block lightly toned at the top edge, a few occasional small spots, else clean and crisp. Early owner's signature ("James Robinson") to title-page; front paste-down with the small bookplate of English journalist and notable book collector Charles Whibley ("Sum Caroli Whibley") who is presumably responsible for the incredibly tiny and precise penciled annotations on the blank endpapers and, on one or two occasions, in the margins.

Thomas Flatman (1637-88) was an accomplished miniature painter as well as a poet. This, the only collection of his verses published in his lifetime, includes the still much admired "Death, A Song" and "A Thought on Death," the latter imitated by no less a poet than Alexander Pope. This third edition was the first to include the preface and the dedication to the Duke of Ormonde, who was so moved by the ode on the death of his son, the Earl of Ossory, that he sent Flatman a diamond ring. "The preface… constitutes an important statement of the aesthetic underlying the emergence of the Pindaric free-verse form in England and gives a valuable insight into the sense of humour and the conversational tone of members of the professional and cultural elites at this time" (ODNB). Prefixed to Flatman's poems are commendatory verses by Charles Cotton, Francis Knollis, and others.