The Year's at the Spring illustrated by Harry Clarke

In 1919  Harry Clarke was commissioned to illustrate a gift anthology of poetry collected by the London poet Lettice D‘Oyly Walters. The antology contains  24 full-page plates and 22 decorative drawings. Clarke‘s biographer Nicola Gordon Bowe points out, that Clarke was badly stuck on the job. She surmises that he may not have been inspired by the poetry in the book. However, it is important to remember that book illustration does not necessarily have to be a representation of the text.The poetry collected in The Year’s at the Spring fails to cohere, but Clarke‘s illustrations share acommon characteristic: they immerse the readers in what J. R. R. Tolkien called a secondary world, that of  "fairie".

 Frontispiece