CLASS POEM. [Lowell, James Russell]:

First edition of Lowell's first separate book publication, preceded by a broadside poem. Author and poet, editor and critic, diplomat and reformer, James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was one of America's leading 19th-century men of letters. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a prominent Massachusetts family, Lowell entered Harvard in 1834 but proved an indifferent student. Several months before graduation, Lowell was rusticated to Concord for violating college rules and spent the remainder of the term there. As the ANB points out, "Lowell's chief regret was that his enforced absence from Cambridge prevented him from fulfilling in person the office of class poet, an honor voted him by his classmates in recognition of his budding literary talents, which had already been displayed in essays and poems published in Harvardiana, the college magazine of which Lowell was an editor." Lowell graduated Harvard in 1838, and his Class Poem was published despite his absence from the commencement ceremonies. After an abortive foray into the law, Lowell turned his sights to literature. He would go on to establish himself as an author and poet, publishing numerous books over the course of his lifetime. He succeeded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855 as professor of modern languages at Harvard, a post he held for two decades. He served as the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1857 to 1861 and as co-editor alongside Charles Eliot Norton of the North American Review from 1864 to 1872, positions which established him as the leading arbiter of American culture and literary taste. A first edition, with its original wrappers bound in, of this first book by an influential American man of letters. BAL 13036. AMERICAN IMPRINTS 51349. ANB 14, pp.40-43. Late 19th-century three-quarter blue morocco, original printed wrappers bound in. Edges rubbed, internally a fine copy.