One Hundred & Seventy Chinese Poems

Waley’s anthology was published at the close of the war in 1918 and soon established itself as one of the enduringly popular English selections of Chinese lyric poetry. The influence of Tang Dynasty lyric, in particular, was being felt in English poetry at this time, notably within the Imagist movement, and Waley appears to acknowledge this in his preface: ‘considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, I have avoided either adding images of my own or suppressing those of the original’ (p.19).

This copy was donated to AVaTAR by its former owner, Diana Bubb (my grandmother). She was born Diana Willatts in the village of Unionhall, Irish Free State in 1929, the daughter of a local woman and a British Royal Marine stationed on the Cork coast. Her parents later moved to England and when she acquired this book at the age of seventeen, she autographed the front free endpaper with the date (November 1947), and her address at the time: 40 St Mary’s Road, Gillingham, Kent. She has also applied a ‘DW’ monogram stamp, and written out a quotation from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: ‘Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world / Shelley’. No markings in text. At this stage in her life, she recalled, a significant literary influence was her parish priest at St Luke’s, Gillingham, Lawrence Lamprell (b. 1907), a man of eclectic tastes who introduced her to Bertrand Russell and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Along with a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, this was one of only two volumes of poetry to have been retained from her childhood library, and until 2022 was kept among a small collection of books at her retirement accommodation in Essex.