COTTON, Charles.

Poems on several Occasions ...

London, Printed for Tho. Basset ... 1689. 8vo., pp. [8], ‘729’ [i.e. 719; with the usual mispaginations], [1]; 2P3 torn not affecting text, very slightly rubbed, nevertheless a fine copy in contemporary sprinkled calf; the Bradley Martin copy. First edition of the principal collection of original poetry by Charles Cotton, an ‘oddly isolated and under-valued poet ... there is more and better poetry in the 1689 volume than is to be found in any other minor poet of the Restoration’ (James Sutherland, Restoration Literature). Cotton’s most successful publication was the coarse burlesque Scarronides, or Virgile Travestie, but it is this volume that has earned him the respect of subsequent poets, notably Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb. Wordsworth saw Burns prefigured here, and Sutherland is prompted to note that Cotton and Burns shared not just the same convivial habits, but the same ‘gaiety which will sometimes turn to melancholy, the unrepentant amorousness, the sincerity and directness of feeling and expression, the close familiarity with nature’.Wing C 6389; Hayward 133; Pforzheimer 221.

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