Confessions of an Anthologist
Walsh, Thomas
POETS are born, they tell us; so are opera singers, I believe, and it is as hard to manage the sons of the lyre as it is for the impresario to persuade some coy or haughty prima donna to sing her...
...One firm plucks another in the merriest fashion in the world...
...He has not replied to my question regarding the fair price he would exact for his copyright permission...
...What was formerly a necessity of scarceness has now become a •necessity of the overplus...
...Then after a few years we grow weary of the scent of roses and the thorns of public indifference—not to mention the biting jealousies of rival bards and the scornful attitudes of college professors...
...The absolute silence that ensued must have troubled this gentleman for in subsequent letters he begs me to complete the contract...
...The business side of this question is indeed confusing: but when it comes to the claims of the original author, the plot thickens...
...One career remains open to us...
...For those of us who practise the black art of anthologists there are some good traditions...
...When one reads much of modern poetry and sees the fine art and technique of modernists that result in practically nothing, one realizes that though our writers of the unbelieving sort have mastered the art of expression they have found nothing worth while to express...
...The publisher is an important factor in this problem ; the rising price of books has inspired the author with a growing desire for the fruits of his labor...
...The question of copyrights Involves both the publisher and author In many difficulties, so that after consulting numerous authorities we are still left In uncertainty regarding the ownership of various literary properties...
...This Is only just and fair...
...some of us marry rich contractors' daughters and take judgeships or places on public commissions...
...Having listened to several missionaries of Bible societies who at the end of sharp arguments have always resorted to the charge that spirituality died out in the Catholic Church before the days of the Reformation, it has been a great delight to uncover a vast wealth of the most spiritual poetry in every age of the Church's history...
...I have silently omitted him from my collection and thankfully accepted the versions of George Sigerson, translating the same poems and offering me through his executor a carte blanche to all his works...
...In the case of a poet we come upon the peculiar character of a work of art...
...I only know for myself that whenever an anthologist has asked for permission to reproduce one or two of my little songs, I have felt "My heart leap up" with joy...
...I was greatly amused when a wellknown translator from the Gaelic informed me that he was the father of eight children, two of whom were still not self-supporting, and would I send him one guinea apiece for the short poems I wished to use and two guineas apiece for the longer ones...
...This period came to an •end with the patent medicine almanac...
...he binds his gathering into a book in hopes that his work will gain a place on the shelves of a reference library, that somebody in this busy world hunting a quotation or a poem appropriate for an occasion, will consult his pages and add to the publicity for which the original poet pined and strove—usually in vain...
...but some of us tread our way into print, chant our little ditties before a general public and please our relations by showing them their family name in real black and white in a monthly or weekly issue...
...Hence in the presence of a vast output of poetry—most of it of appalling badness—we are in need of trained selection...
...Our laws insist that to secure American copyright a book published in Eng land shall be reissued In America within at least a few months after its original publication abroad...
...The gentlemen of the publishing world are therefore not too anxious to provide the dates of the first issue of a book, and when, a few years later, they discover an interest on the part of the American public, they issue a work upon which they assert a dubious copyright...
...so many books, so much advice and instruction have flooded our age from the newspaper, the magazine and the untiring publisher, that a sort of guidance is necessary if we are to find some intelligent way through it all...
...riddled with a chronic poetical rheumatism, counting on the friends and comrades whom we have boomed, whose poems we have applauded, and praised, (God forgive our youthful dishonesties I) we come into the open, unashamed, without a qualm or a blush, and declare ourselves anthologists...
...In the vast majority of cases I have met with supreme courtesy and helpfulness...
...My work in reviewing the Catholic field of poetry has shown me that there is a great and yet unrevealed treasure of thought among us...
...Old Father Ryder had given us the first Catholic collection—a rather finer effort than an achievement—and then a whole swarm of followers came over the poetical world, the Oxford Books of Verse, Burton Stevenson's monster collection, Harriet Monroe's school for western poetry, De la Mare's delightful anthology, Marguerite Wilkinson's industrious gleanings in many volumes, Joyce Kilmer's Catholic collection, Theodore Maynard's excellent presentation of the CathoHc poets of our own times, and Shane Leslie's and Padraic Colum's selections from English and Irish poetry...
...There have always been good Italian and Spanish antologias and editions of Mejores Poesias...
...Down to the present moment we have continued to produce poets who are so numerous and important that a nonCatholic reviewer recently declared that from a study of the question it would appear that poetry taken as a whole was a Catholic faculty...
...so are opera singers, I believe, and it is as hard to manage the sons of the lyre as it is for the impresario to persuade some coy or haughty prima donna to sing her aria if she does not feel like it...
...That we should, after all these glories and advantages, claim additional fees from our fellow-workers and artists who are struggling with the work of the world, usually without hope of any substantial monetary regard, strikes me as a rather questionable proceeding...
...but in some other quarters where I might expect courtesy, not to speak of generosity or even gratitude for favors past, I have encountered a peculiar spirit of opposition and even offense...
...There are certain cases of really valuable copyright which I recognize and respect, but in the cases in question, I am speaking of people who only rejoice in any outside opportunity for publicity and could not in any event be injured in their property or artistic rights by inclusion in any anthology...
...So that now in every publishing firm of importance there is a young clerk handling the matter of granting permission to reprint even the poorest scrap of a poet's work...
...others, more perverse, resort to newspaper work, becoming editors, possibly publishers or even novelists, and the lyre falls out of tune as the shadows darken...
...we are ready to accept the floral tributes, which are not thrust too often upon us, and the emoluments of professorial or political berths and the joys of giving our autograph at afternoon tea-parties...
...This is our answer to this charge of our opponents...
...The sweet consolation of all this^—the poor monetary return...
...The English and Irish poets seem to think that any request from America should be accompanied with a check payable...
...I have heard of odium theologicum but now I see that there exists a very definite odium poeticum which is just as unreasoning and bitter...
...Having devoted a goodly part of my reviewing interests to Irish poetry, could I have expected gross insults from at least two of these bards domiciled in our own United States who call me everything except a thief when they are informed in my politest manner that I cannot afford to pay their charges and must omit them from my new book...
...It seems to me that we are on the threshold of a new era, when all published matter will be reduced to proportions that will enable busy people to cover a subject, as is attempted with the arts, the news and science in the pages of the Literary Digest...
...Another poet informed me that he personally expected $10.00 for the use of one of his poems, telling me that the laborer was worthy of his hire...
...I answered, agreeing with him wholeheartedly in his economic principles but asking him if he really believed that in my anthology of over a thousand poems, his share in cooperation was worth his charges...
...Some few years ago I prepared and published an anthology of Spanish literature under the title of The Hispanic Anthology...
...there is little investigation of these claims and an important house usually pays the fees without engaging in any dispute, counting on getting its returns when its own opportunity occurs...
...Has this work been overdone, as some of our critics aver, or are we only at the beginning of a codification of the masses of poetry...
...We consider ourselves entitled to the prestige of artists...
...As poets we assert that there is something special in us, some gift of heaven that bids us sing, that entitles us to a recognition (which very few of us ever receive) and gives us a position more or less equivalent to that of the ancient bards or the medicine men among savage tribes...
...We authors live on publicity and die for lack of it, and while I have always made it a business rule to exact payment from my first publisher, I felt in accepting his check I had received my wages...
...The Catholic Anthology, if they do not return me the courtesy which I wish to show them...
...Any attempt to ascertain whether or not there is a copyright upon the works of English poets leads into a labyrinth of difficulties...
...My early youth was tinctured by my mother's well-worn William CuUen Bryant's Library of Poetry and Song, succeeded by the English Golden Treasury...
...The author, having accepted his check for the original publication, now has no intention of giving his work to the publisher or even to the reading world, but pursues the copyists and reproducers of his work with an avidity never known to literature before...
...When I realized furthermore that there was real monetary value in my manuscript, I awaited further settlements from the publisher...
...Our conditions today take us back to the times of the primitive encyclopaedias, the Ladies' Garlands, the catechisms, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, when the presses were so slow and books so scarce and valuable that it was necessary to crowd prose and verse together, to give a polite letter of love-proposal for some farmhand, some moral instruction for the youngsters, or to tell mother how to baste her pies and father how to cure the pigs of the pip...
...Most of my original poets were happily in their graves, but those who are alive have signaled their feelings of gratitude in an unmistakable way and I have enjoyed such honors from their literary academies and the governments of Spain and South American countries as to contract a sort of blindness when I approached our modern English and American poets...
...On computation, I find that he is touched with a profiteering germ and that the value of his poem would amount to some five two-cent stamps...
...we have reached an age of codes in our laws and in our sciences, and of selective anthologies in our literature...
...he goes about like some Buddhist monk with a bowl collecting scraps of poetry written by the dead or living...
...Now we are all poets, in a sense...
...we are in need of the collectors, the benevolent assimilators, the raging vampires of the publishing world today—the anthologists...
...The publishers, seeing values in reproducing rights, begin to assert an ownership in manuscripts originally published serially and later incorporated between book covers...
...Now an anthologist is a more or less necessary public nuisance...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 7
