Cloth binding for Yeats’s ‘Poems’

Herbert Granville Fell (1872-1951)

1895

Cloth binding gilt

Signed

Fell was commissioned to design this front cover for Yeats following the poet’s visit to an exhibition of the artist’s drawings. Yeats must have thought that Fell’s imagery was a good fit with his own, but did not issue him with any guidance; left to his own devices, Fell evokes a dreamy medievalism, producing an heraldic motif which fails to characterize Yeats’s verse.[Commentary continues below.]

Scan and text by Simon Cooke. [Click on image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]

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