The Poems Oscar Wilde.

WILDE, Oscar.

$400.00

Item Number: 139758

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927.

First Bosschere edition of the poems of Oscar Wilde. Quarto, original publisher’s cloth, top edge gilt with other untrimmed, illustrated with 8 color plates and 8 black and white plates. One of 2,000 numbered copies, this is number 1647. Near fine in the rare original dust jacket with a large loss to the front panel.

Wilde’s “theme is not, as is often supposed, art’s divorce from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experience. His creative works almost always end in unmasking. The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger. While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. We must acknowledge what we are. Wilde at least was keen to do so. Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his created world contains much pain” (Ellmann, xvi).