Lot 23
Mid-20th-century English poetry
Large collection of works from the library of literary critic W. J. Harvey
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
all 8vo, original cloth unless otherwise stated, nearly all with dust jackets, a large proportion with Harvey's dated ownership inscription to front free endpaper, several with his annotations to the text, titles include:
Amis, Kingsley. Bright November. Poems. London: Fortune Press, [1947]. First edition, first impression, dust jacket not price-clipped and retaining original price of 6s, Harvey's ownership inscription dated 1947 to front free endpaper, his ink annotations ('Dismal imagery deficient …') to rear free endpaper;
Ibid. A Frame of Mind. Eighteen Poems. Reading: [printed under the direction of William McCance at the] School of Art, University of Reading, 1953. First edition, one of 150 numbered copies, original wrappers;
Larkin, Philip (contributor). Oxford Poetry 1942-1943. Edited by Ian Davie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1943. First edition, first impression, original wrappers (nicked, marked, split to upper half of front joint, loss to foot of spine), Harvey's ownership inscription to title-page, annotations to text;
Auden, W. H., Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, et al. (contributors). Oxford Poetry, 1928 […] 1929. Edited by Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender […] 1930. Edited by Stephen Spender and Bernard Spender. 1930. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928-29-30. 3 volumes, first editions, first impressions, original japon-backed boards, Harvey's ownership inscription to front free endpapers;
and some 200 others similar, including further works by Auden (e.g. first impressions in dust jackets of New Year Letter, 1941, and The Age of Anxiety, 1948, and early impressions of other titles), MacNeice, Spender, works by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, numerous other Faber titles (e.g. Lawrence Durrell, Cities, Plains and People, 1946, and Dylan Thomas, Letters to Vernon Watkins, both first editions, first impressions, in dust jackets), 20+ Fortune Press titles (in dust jackets), Beowulf: A Metrical Translation into Modern English by John Clark Hall (Cambridge: University Press, 1941), Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment … with Prefatory Remarks by J. R. R. Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950, with dust jacket), Hogarth Press titles including instalment in the New Writing and Daylight series, together with a few non-poetry titles including D. H. Lawrence first editions, Virginia Woolf uniform editions, etc. (approx. 200)
Provenance
By direct descent from W. J. Harvey.
Footnote
W. J. Harvey (1925-1967) was a literary critic best remembered for his 1965 work Character and the Novel, recently identified in The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (2010) as one of two ‘exemplary humanistic accounts of novelistic character’, alongside John Bayley's The Characters of Love. He studied at the University of Oxford before holding academic posts including professor of English at Queen's College, Belfast, where he taught Seamus Heaney, who after Harvey's death instigated the publication of his book of poems, Descartes' Dream, which appeared in 1973.