VERLAINE, Paul
Poëmes saturniens
Paris: Alph. Lemerre, 1866.

First edition. 12mo (actually "in-18 Jésus," the paper 17.8 x 11.7 cm). One of 491 copies on vélin wove paper, apart from 5 copies on chine and 9 on hollande. Near-contemporary parchment covers over the original volume in its printed yellow wrappers (imprinted "1867"), spine with gilt lettering and rules, top edges gilt, others uncut, ribbon marker intact, in a beige bookcloth chemise and tan quarter morocco slipcase (19.7 x 13.5 cm), the slipcase spine in six compartments with gilt lettering and blind tooling. Collates [4 ll. (binder's blanks)], 2 ll. (original wrappers), [1 l.], 1 l. (half-title), 1 l. (prefatory poem), pp. (1) - 163, 1 p. (printer's notice and device, and the date of printing, October 20, 1866). Minor soiling on spine and wear to gilt spine lettering, negligible soiling on covers, otherwise fine overall. A brightly printed, sympathetically bound copy of this prized volume, internally near pristine. Vicaire VII, 989.

This first edition of the 22-year-old Verlaine's first book, printed superbly by Damase Jouaust ostensibly for the publisher Alphonse Lemerre, was actually underwritten by the poet with the subsidy of his cousin (and more than cousin, "Après Trois Ans") Élisa Moncomble Dujardin. In March 1866, during the late gestation of the book, Lemerre's journal L'Art became Le Parnasse contemporaine, throwing Verlaine along with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lecomte de Lisle, José-Maria Heredia and others under the rubric of the "Parnassians." Yet for the most part the Poëmes saturniens go beyond and surpass the dry Parnassian anti-Romantic neo-Graecian ethos. "And once, at least, in "Mon Rêve familier," he wrote verse which none of his predecessors could have written; verse entirely his own, uneasy, exquisite, nostalgic, and obsessive, the sort of verse we think of whenever we pronounce his name." A.E. Carter, Verlaine: A Study in Parallels (University of Toronto Press, 1969), at 37.

Provenance: Jane Engelhard (who was a Trustee of the Pierpont Morgan Library).

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