First Kelmscott Press edition, this one of 300 on ‘Flower’ paper from an edition of 310 copies. The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems was the first book published by the writer, printer, and designer William Morris (1834-1896), and was originally issued at the author’s own expense in March 1858, just before his twenty-fifth birthday. The volume also had the distinction of being the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry to be published, and it ‘accordingly drew scorn from a critical establishment still uneasy about the influence of the Brotherhood founded ten years previously. The Spectator was representative in speaking of the “faults of affectation and bad taste” in the poems, although there were a few favourable responses. What seemed affectation to conventional minds was what attracted younger readers to poems that carry the Romantic impulse strongly forward in the narrative form which [...] held the strongest appeal for Morris. These are some of the most powerful poems of the mid-century’ (P. Faulkner, ‘The Writer’ in L. Parry (ed.), William Morris (London, 1996), pp. 44-48, at p. 45). Similarly, Morris’s biographer Fiona McCarthy judges that ‘[t]hese are difficult poems, unsettling and demanding. Not all are successful [...]. But at their best they have a brilliance, a freshness and a quirkiness that Morris’s poetry did not achieve again’ (F. McCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Time (London, 1994), p. 143). Despite the initial critical reception, later in the nineteenth century Algernon Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed their admiration for these poems, while in the twentieth century both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats admired them, and the first edition of 1858 was followed by a number of reprints. ¶¶

The Kelmscott Press edition of The Defence of Guenevere was set from a Reeves & Turner reprint of 1889, with minor alterations, and was the fifth book published by Morris’s Kelmscott Press. It was published on 19 May 1892, and the edition was composed of 310 copies, 300 of which were printed on the first size of ‘Flower’ paper made by Joseph Batchelor for Morris (as here) and were sold for 2 guineas each (the remaining 10 copies were printed on vellum and sold for about 12 guineas each). This Kelmscott Press edition of The Defence of Guenevere is notable as both the first book from the press to be bound in limp vellum and the only one to have a hand-lettered title on the spine (the calligraphy was by H.M. Ellis, the son of Morris’s friend, literary associate, and executor, F.S. Ellis). ¶¶

E. Le Mire, Bibliography of William Morris, A-2.04; W.S. Peterson, Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (1985), A5. ¶¶¶

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