LITERATURE 10 “Had We But World Enough And Time”: First Edition Of Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems, 1681, With First Printing Of “To His Coy Mistress” First and only collected edition of Marvell’s poetry to be published in his own century, containing the first printing of many poems, including “To His Coy Mistress,” with scarce engraved frontispiece portrait. A wide-margined copy in full morocco-gilt by Riviere & Son. “The finest flower of secular and serious metaphysical poetry… Marvell united in himself, with an independent moderation of his own, a fresh muscular, agile, and subtle metaphysical wit and the rationality, clarity, economy, and structural sense of a genuine classic… It is [Marvell’s] blending of the metaphysical and the classical which makes ‘To His Coy Mistress’ stand out as it does even in such an age of love poetry” (Bush, 158-63). Very few of Marvell’s poems, and none of his important metaphysical poems, were published in his lifetime. This copy is complete with the rare engraved frontispiece portrait of Marvell, and Mary Marvell’s address “To The Reader,” both of which are often missing. This is, as in all known copies but two, the second issue, omitting the suppressed poems (pages 117-130) in praise of Cromwell. Text exceptionally clean, Riviere binding beautiful and fine. Rare and desirable. 07MARVELL, Andrew. Miscellaneous Poems. London, 1681. Slim folio, late 19th-century full brown morocco gilt. $25,000
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