The Complete Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Edited with a memoir by Sir Edmund Gosse and decorated by The Dance of Death of Hans Holbein. [With a prefatory publishers' note by Jack Lindsay]. This item is unavailable.The Complete Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Edited with a memoir by Sir Edmund Gosse and decorated by The Dance of Death of Hans Holbein. [With a prefatory publishers' note by Jack Lindsay]

2 vols. Cloth-backed patterned boards, printed paper labels. Spine labels slightly darkened, corners of covers slightly rubbed, free endpapers embrowned, some offsetting from frontispiece portrait in vol. i. Edition limited to 750 numbered copies; printed at the Crypt House Press. "The expression, 'a poet's poet,' often carelessly and insignificantly applied, is entirely appropriate to Beddoes [Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849], whose works can only be appreciated by those who have made some study of poetic art. In his caustic way, he defined his own verse as 'entertaining, very unamiable and utterly unpopular.' This was to distinguish it from what was facile, sentimental and superficial. It was exclusively the work of an artist who was concerned only with the principles and practice of an art which he cultivated, at great disadvantage, for its own sake, and with no thought of a reward . . . His genius was narrowly limited. Nevertheless, his treatment of the ghastly subjects which he loved, his inspired absorption in the circumstance and revelry of death, his force of imagination, and, above all, his consummate skill in the composition of resonant verse give him a high place in the second order of English poets" (Edmund Gosse, who died while these volumes were at press).…