Maroon cloth spine with gilt decoration and title. Green Leatherette boards.

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A well bound book which suffers from a little internal spotting.

The Book of Songs was Heinrich Heine’s first large volume of poetry, in which he brought together all of his poems known at the time. The first edition was published in 1827 in Hamburg by Hoffmann and Campe .

The Book of Songs includes Heine’s early work, with poems from 1817 to 1826. It took almost twenty years until the second large volume of poetry, Neue Gedichte, was published in 1844 (the third and last volume , Romanzero, followed in 1851). There is not much of the political satire that is typical of Heine’s later works , such as in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen , in the Book of Songs . Instead, 142 of the 237 poems deal with unhappy love . Heine’s feelings for his cousin Amalie and later for her sister Therese (1807–1880) , who was seven years younger than him , both daughters of Salomon Heine , are cited as an explanation for this. Heine commented on this interpretation in a letter to Karl Immermann dated 10 June 1823:

“Only one thing that can hurt me most painfully is when someone tries to explain the spirit of my poems from history (you know what that word means) from the history of the author. It hurt me deeply and bitterly when I saw yesterday in a letter from an acquaintance how he wanted to construct my entire poetic being from hastily put-together stories and made unpleasant statements about life impressions, political position, religion, etc. If something similar had been said publicly I would have been quite outraged and I am heartily glad that it never happened. However easily the history of a poet could provide information about his poem, however easily it could actually be proven that political position, religion, private hatred, prejudice and considerations often influenced his poem, one should never mention this, especially not during the poet’s lifetime. One deflowers the poem, as it were, one tears apart its mysterious veil, if the influence of history which one demonstrates is actually present; one disfigures the poem if one has mistakenly put it in. And how little often does the external framework of our story fit with our real, internal story! For me at least, it never fits.”

The Book of Songs also contains political poems. For example, Donna Clara is a critique of contemporary anti-Semitism .The most famous poems include The Grenadiers , The Loreley (“I don’t know what it should mean”), In the beautiful month of May , The old, evil songs and Belsatzar .

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (German: born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine’s later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered a member of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities—which, however, only added to his fame. He spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.