1888 Australian Poets 1788-1888 by D.B.W Sladen Antique Poetry Reference Book

Extending to more than 600 pages, the anthology presents work by a remarkably wide range of writers from the Australian colonies and New Zealand. Major literary figures such as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall, Marcus Clarke and William Charles Wentworth appear alongside journalists, public figures, bush poets and now largely forgotten colonial writers. Each poet is accompanied by a brief biographical or bibliographical note, making the book not merely a collection of verse but an invaluable contemporary record of the people, publications and literary culture that shaped nineteenth-century Australasian writing.

Published jointly in London and Sydney by Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh in 1888, this first edition remains an important landmark in the early documentation of Australian and New Zealand literature. The volume retains its original red cloth binding, lettered in gilt to the front board and spine, and bears the attractive pictorial bookplate of J. B. Prentice. Both a sweeping anthology and a centenary survey of colonial literary achievement, it is a significant work for collectors of early Australian poetry, bibliography and cultural history."