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First edition, from the library of Edward Saint-Barbe, the paramour of the French aristocratic writer Astolphe de Custine, with Saint-Barbe's ownership signature, dated 1820, and his extensive manuscript notes on Keats across the first few leaves. The notes include an unpublished sonnet on the poet's death, and the teasing suggestion that Saint-Barbe owned some of his original manuscripts: "I possess the MSS of the first volume [of] poems he published, they evince considerable genius & originality." An English expatriate in Paris, Saint-Barbe (1794-1858) lived openly with his lover, the Marquis de Custine (1790-1857), for more than 30 years. The two men often travelled together to Rome, where they visited Keats's grave in the Protestant Cemetery. In his notes, Saint-Barbe quotes Keats's epitaph, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water", and repeats the popular myth that Keats died "of a broken heart from the severity of certain English critics" in their reviews of Endymion - a notion advanced by Byron in his notorious suggestion that Keats was "snuffed out by an Article". Saint-Barbe's sonnet is an accomplished elegy on the poet's early death, which touches on the Keatsian preoccupations of fancy, inspiration, and embarrassment, delightfully invoking Keats as "Queen of the flushing cheek & glance of fire!" While no complete autograph manuscripts for Keats's first book, Poems (1817), are known to survive, several drafts and fair copies of individual poems reappeared in the last century, many acquired by the poet and Keats biographer Amy Lowell and the industrialist Arthur A. Houghton Jr. and subsequently donated to Harvard University. Little is known about the provenance of these manuscripts before the 20th century, and Saint-Barbe's notes offer a tantalizing suggestion as to their early ownership. READ MORE Duodecimo (165 x 102 mm), pp. [vi], 200, [2]. Contemporary calf, spine with four raised bands, brown morocco label, compartments decorated in gilt, border to covers tooled in gilt, board edges and turn-ins gilt, marbled edges and endpapers, blue silk bookmarker. Housed in a custom brown quarter morocco folding box. Bound without half-title and terminal advertisements. A little marked and rubbed, short superficial splits to joints but binding firm, occasional spot of foxing to contents, pencil underlinings to the text. A very good copy. .

The Eve of St. Agnes is a romantic poem written by John Keats in 1819, published in 1820. This poem is written in Spenserian stanzas and is considered one of Keats's finest works. It tells the story of a young lady named Madeline and her romantic endeavor on the eve of St. Agnes.