WITH:
There Is No Death: Poems By Richard Dennys (John Lane, 1917). First edition.
 
A poignant association copy of the first edition of Rupert Brooke’s war poems, owned by the war poet Richard Dennys, who also perished in the conflict. Octavo. Publisher’s blue cloth, with printed paper title label to spine. Inscribed for Dennys by his aunt to the front free endpaper, “R.M. Dennys, with “old” love, from Aunt B. June 1915”.
 
A very good copy, spine label a little darkened and worn.
 
An exceptional association copy of the first edition of Brooke’s most celebrated publication, featuring the war sonnets that immortalised his name.
 
His most famous line, from the opening of The Soldier, “If I should die think only this of me, that they’re some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”, ended up imitating life.
 
He contracted a disease en route to Gallipoli in 1915, and died near the island of Skyros, where up on a cliff’s edge, a statue still stands as that “corner of a foreign field.”
 
Mere weeks after Brooke’s own death, this copy of his Poems was given to the war poet Richard Molesworth Dennys.
 
At the outbreak of war Dennys was in Florence working with Gordon Craig at his theatre school. He immediately returned to England to serve, was commissioned in 1914 and served on the Western Front, being promoted to Captain by December 1914. He wrote poems throughout his service, inclduing the poignant ‘Come When It May’.
 
At the Battle Of The Somme in July 1916 Dennys was mortally wounded, and died twelve days later. His own poems were collected and published posthumously the following year under the title There Is No Death.