VIVIEN, Renee. Le Vent des Vaisseaux.

(Paris): E. Sansot & Cie, 1910. First edition. 18 × 12 cm. 103 pp. A posthumous collection of poems issued by Vivien’s longtime publisher. The volume gathers lyrical, symbolist verse suffused with imagery of sea, wind, and voyage — themes of exile, longing, spiritual turbulence, and poetic aspiration recur throughout, reflecting the poet’s characteristic melancholy and existential restlessness. Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn in England in 1877, moved to Paris at twenty-one to pursue a literary career. Between 1901 and her death in 1909 at the age of thirty-two, she produced more than thirty volumes of poetry, short fiction, translations of Sappho’s fragments, and a novel. She wrote exclusively in French, demonstrating a rigorous command of classical French prosody. A devoted scholar of Greek, she brought considerable philological sensitivity to her translations of Sappho. Vivien was also a well-known figure within the Parisian lesbian literary circle often referred to as “Paris Tout Lesbos,” and she is now regarded as one of the first significant openly lesbian poets of the twentieth century. A very good copy in the original decorated wrappers.