do you think in each instance I can footnote his emendations

Yes.

-o-
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in the case of those sonnets which Hardy revised for the ’23 Collected,

I assume I must use the unrevised earlier versions,

but do you think in each instance I can footnote his emendations

under the “fair use” clause?

thanks for your help…
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actually Hardy only published 3 more sonnets after the 1922 book,

so I could do something like:

SONNETS 1866-1922
Thomas Hardy

from:
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
Time’s Laughing Stocks (1909)
Moments of Vision (1917)
Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

Captain Hook Books [my press]

*
These are printed in the order they appeared in the collections published from 1898 to 1922.
Any dates or notations below the sonnets are by Hardy himself.

*
Human shows, far phantasies (1925) has only one sonnet, “Discouragement” (Complete Poems #811), with a note below it that says: “From old MS.”
Winter Words (1928) adds one more:
“We Are Getting to the End” (CP #918, the penultimate poem—).
One more appears in the “Uncollected” section of CP, #924: “Thoughts from Sophocles (Oedipus Colonus 1200-1250)” . . .

*
So this PDF includes every Hardy sonnet but the three mentioned above.

…

can’t put me in jail for i hope
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Here is what one needs to know about public domain laws in the United States:

1. Works published before 1923 are in the public domain.

2. Works published between 1964 and 1977 (inclusive) enter the public domain 95 years after first publication.

3. Works published between 1923 and 1963 (inclusive) have entered into the public domain unless they filed for an extension, in which case it would enter the public domain 95 years after first publication.

4. Works published during or after 1978 enter the public domain 70 years after the [last surviving] author dies.

For reasons too boring to iterate, the extensions mentioned in #3 are quite rare, especially beyond a handful of best-selling poets.

British copyright law on literary works can differ between countries but is generally set at:

1. 50 years from the date of publication for published works;

2. 125 years from creation or 31 December 2039 for unpublished works; and,

3. 25 years for “typographical arrangements” (roughly, anthologies), as in the United States.

my project is nixed

Not necessarily. If you’re quoting parts of the poems “Fair use” applies. If you’re including the whole poem your project is made a little more tedious; you have to get the permission of the copyright holders, who usually leave the matter of requests to their publishers. The good news is that publishers are almost always more than happy to give consent as long as you cite the source. Who turns down free advertising?

HTH,

Colin
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if i’m understanding the charts there right,
all books published after Jan 1 1923

are not in public domain until 95 years after their pub date,

which means my project is nixed

..,
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Is there a source for that date?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law
“All copyrightable works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain;”

You can Google “public domain” or “U.S. copyright law” for the original legalese if you wish.

HTH,

Colin
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I’m trying to edit and publish what i think would be a valuble book, but my access resources are limited . . .

any help on these copyright matters would be greatly appreciated and attributed…

here’s a biblio from a Yale site:

1898 Wessex Poems (poems)

1902 Poems of the Past and the Present (poems)

1909 Time’s Laughingstocks
(poems)

1914 Satires of Circumstance
(poems)

1917 Moments of Vision
(poems)

1922 Late Lyrics and Earlier
(poems)

1925 Human Shows
(poems)

1928 Winter Words
(poems)

. . . Seymour-Smith mentions a 1919 Collected and then a 1923 Collected
(which presumably added the ’22 book),

I assume the ’23 Collected he mentions is the American ’25 . . .

…
any info or direction would be welcome——

I’d love to do this Complete Sonnets if I can clear up the confusions re copyright etcet….
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…

Don, thanks for your input, but why do you believe that? Is there a source for that date?

>There’s a publishing co in England, “Wordsworth Editions”, which does a lot of classics in inexpensive editions, but only if they’re out of copyright——

They have a Collected Poems (including his last book “Winter Words”) of Hardy in 1994——

it’s available on Amazon—

*
>Also the mid-20s (25? 26?) Collected (without “Winter Words”) can be bought on Amazon, with this detail: * Hardcover: 708 pages * Publisher: Pomona Press (pubdate: November 4, 2008)—

*
>Then there’s “Thomas Hardy: the Complete Poems,” at 1040 pages,
published by Palgrave Macmillan (February 9, 2002), copyrighted 1976 by Macmillan London Ltd [and "Winter" copyright the Hardy Estate] . . .

*
>My hardcover of the American edition of the pre-”Winter” Collected says copyright 1925 the Macmillan Company.

*
I’m still confused——

which of Hardy’s poems are PD,

and which aren’t?

any help appreciated please….
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Love yr ‘shite and onions’ post.

“Basically, jealous of the poets with more ability who learn their trade and go about it by getting meter fixed first, and with most of the crazees having little in the way of talent, but lots in the way of ambition – this disaffected bunch find a perfect solution to the dilemma of having to come up with the eternal jizz on the page, by acting like spoilt middle-class ten year olds rebelling against mommy and papa.” -D. Swords

Couldn’t have described Modernism any better myself! ‘Ezrastotle’ That’s great, is that yours?

To the rest of you,

I appreciate the idea of ‘what’s YOUR anthology’ and why don’t we all come up with our own, but this leaves out the spirit of criticism, so absent in poetry today; it’s 99% appreciation, 1% criticism.

The key thing is to say why Rothenberg’s anthology fails, for only here do we begin to build something. If Rothenberg had done his job, I wouldn’t have to be doing all this work; I could relax and enjoy myself…curse you, Rothenberg! When we see failure, we have to point it out so it doesn’t happen again and waste time for those coming after. There’s no time to waste! Soon we’ll be old and tired, so let’s get busy, so we can rest easy.

The scholar of literature making any sort of anthology really has but two choices: the popular one, in which one presents a kind of view-from-the-street of what was really happening in society at large, or, the metaphysical one, in which the profoundest and most harmonious ideas and art are presented. Personal prejudices of taste and ideology need not apply.

With these two principles in mind, one CANNOT, in an anthology of the Romantic era, transgressive or not, LEAVE OUT:

Kant, Hegel, Voltaire, Sir Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Johnson, Augustus William Schlegel, Schelling, George Ticknor, Defoe, Hazlitt, Lamb, Thomas Moore, Thomas Hood, Henry Chorley, William Godwin, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Piero Maroncelli, Disraeli, Bronson Alcott, Gautier, Clough, Landor, George Crabbe, Horace Walpole, Thompson, Gray, Cranch, Lisle, William Ellery Channing, Chenier, de Musset, Ruskin, Dumas, Vyazemsky, Krasicki, Stefan George, Kipling, Hardy, William Morris, Schiller, Margaret Fuller, Marx, Engels, Beethoven, Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Browne, George Lippard, Douglas, Bryant, Irving, Cooper, Willis, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Russell, Pitt, Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jones Very, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, William and Henry James, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Helen Whitman, Frances Osgood, William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes,Samuel F.B. Morse, Freneau, Horace Greeley, Lincoln, Burke, Bayard Taylor, Washington Allston, Simms, Timrod, Tuckerman, Lanier, Bierce, James Lowell, and Dunbar,

devote 2 pages to Rousseau, 3 pages to Poe, 1 page to Mary Shelley, 1 page to Thourea, and 1 page to Freud,

WHILE DEVOTING:

5 pages to Christopher Smart, 10 pages to Holderlin, 10 pages to D. Wordsworth, 10 pages to John Clare, 5 pages to Thomas Beddoes, 10 pages to Swinburne, 20 pages to Rimbaud, 15 pages to Leopardi, 15 pages to Solomos, 35 pages to Pushkin, 10 pages to Edward Lear, 20 pages to the Rosettis, 20 pages to Mallarme, 10 pages to Dickinson, 15 pages to Whitman, 10 pages to Baudelaire, 10 pages to Marti, 10 pages to Verlaine, 10 pages to Nietzsche, 5 pages to Laforgue, 10 pages to Dario, 10 pages to Gertrude Stein, 10 pages to Alfred Jarry, and 10 pages to Apollinaire.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I hope this text will not be presented to students (shudder). Rothenberg is simply wearing his Pound-prejudice on his sleeve; his anti-Romantic, Modernist, New Critical, ahistorical feelings are self-evident, and finally appalling. The infestation of this Modernist worm is all-too-common; Rothenberg’s prejudices, which are shared by so many in academia, are eating through the fabric of our literature, and I say we kill the Poundhead with a good spray of True Romanticism before the worm does any more damage.

Thomas
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but I couldn’t find what I wanted to know,

which is:

is the 1927 edition of Hardy’s Collected Poems (the American edition published by MacMillian)

in public domain,

or is it still in copyright?

A simple yes or no question, but I can’t find the answer anywhere online,

so I would appreciate help from anyone who can point me toward

a resolution——

sign me frustrated

…
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Knott, here’s a site with a lot of information on public domain books. http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/public-domain.shtml There’s also something called Creative Commons. I agree that Lulu books look great (I just wish they didn’t package them in so many unnecessary and enviro-harmful packing materials). Sign me up for a copy of your edition of Hardy’s sonnets (Hardy is really in need of selected editions of all kinds, for that matter) and the Larkin too (including, I hope, his backwards sonnet.)

I’m glad Julie got Thomas to share his ideas about what should be in the anthology. There is a lot of knowledge on Harriet.
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i have a question please: is there

a website which lists the authors/books which have gone out-of-copyright

and into free domain?

I’ve been collating a p-o-d edition of the complete sonnets of Thomas Hardy,

which i want to put out in a nonprofit edition for public purchase and or free download,

but i’m confused as to which Hardy is still under copyright——

I could publish a private edition easily enough, and have perfectbound copies printed for myself and my friends,

but if it’s possible I’d like to do the Hardy sonnets as a publically-available book——

(needless to say, Hardy’s greedybastard copyright publishers should have issued such a volume decades ago!)

… anyways i’m stumped about the copyright mishegas….

…
please! anybody! help! is there a site

that LISTS authors/titles/etc

which have now gone (or are about to go)

into the public domain?

…
ps. my private edition of “Philip Larkin: the Complete Sonnets”

is delightful to read——perusing

chronologically from page to page his 29 sonnets,

is to marvel at how brilliantly he developed from that first one

(the first poem of his early work included in the Faber Complete is a sonnet)

up to his masterpieces in the form——

the 29 sonnets make a nice 36 page perfectbound paperback . . . which cost me about 6 dollars.

I think I’m going to have a hardcover copy printed for myself,

and give this paperback to a friend——

…
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in thankyou a readable fontsize—

fuck Oxford and all these other horrible “publishers” who either don’t do the books, or if they do do them, print them in minuscule squintscope——

you’re correct, Finch, when you say:

“I imagine each of us would edit an entirely different anthology of Romanticism.”

Yes: right: and what’s stopping each of us from doing just that?——

Nothing!

It costs NOTHING to edit and create a p-o-d book (on Lulu.com or other venues),

no money at all

to collate and edit your own anthol(s) of 19th C. verse——

and to publish your edition for public purchase/download/distribution——

I don’t know if you’ve seen perfectbound paperbacks printed by Lulu.com——

the quality of their manufacture is as good (and better in some cases)

as most “real” publishers….

>>>
Stop complaining about Rothenberg’s RoPo

and do your own anthol of it——

your anthol would cost nothing in financial investment on your part——

and in terms of effort, you could probably copy most of it from the web, and scan the rest into your printfile——

stop whining and start collating.

…
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T.
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Terreson
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I suspect you are right, Annie Finch, and come closer to the point. Something else comes to mind, however, that may not be too far off your observation. I know of two men writers who, perhaps more than most, are, shall we say, women friendly. The first is Stendhal who wrote one of the earliest condemnations of the European educational system of his day for its exclusion of women. He was also an early student of history to point out that the Troubador times of 12th C. Provance was a time in which women enjoyed more equality The second would be Goethe. For example, I always get a chuckle out of the notion that, in the end, God saves the Faustian hero from Mephistopheles. The whole idea amounts to a misreading of the tragedy. Goethe could not have been clearer on the point of salvation. Faust, Part II ends with a poem called the “Chorus Mysticus:”

(prose translation) “All transient things are but a parable; the inaccessible here becomes actuality; here the ineffable is achieved; the Eternal Feminine draws us forward.”

So far as I know Goethe coined that phrase, the Eternal Feminine. Again, in my view. It could not be clearer wherein Goethe finds salvation. (What a contrast to the Don Juan type lover for whom love, or seduction, is an act of revenge.) Anyway, my only point is to wonder to what extent women readers instinctively know Goethe is a guy friendly to their gender.

I should love to see a feminist thinker, preferrably a woman, pursue the thesis. Especially since, if I am right, here is another reason Goethe remains a model for me.

Just riffing on your comment.

Terreson
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I appreciate your comments.

My “U.S.-centric” take was simply a response to the five per cent U.S content of Rothenberg’s anthology (with repetitions of Emerson/Whitman, a large selection of Melville’s poetry–read ONLY because Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren told us we ought to read his poetry 60 years ago in “Understanding Poetry,” the dreary, pedantic textbook of Fugitive, New Critical Pound-ism).

George III must figure into a transgressive history of Romanticism. (Shelley’s ‘England in 1819′ is just one example) I agree with what you say about a country’s borders–the American revolution was an international revolution, involving France, Poland, etc etc and Britain was certainly not confined to England’s borders! Keats’ brother and family moved to America–an inspiration to the great poet; Southey and Coleridge were planning to start a commune together in America. The U.S. was the hope of revolution and liberty for the whole world during this time.

Thomas
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Other things you mentioned — about Byron and about history, for example — were remarkably similar to parts of the review I wrote, so I’m still not sure what your first post meant to say. I’m actually quite interested in the differences between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and think it makes just as much sense to see the American and French Revolutions as products of the Enlightenment: my latest sonnet series “Against Romanticism” touches on a few of these issues. Anyway, I’m not interested in blurring, but as Blake wrote, making “clear demarcations.”

Thanks for your interest.
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Thanks for responding.

If “U.S. v. Britain and how France fits in” as a late 18th/19th cen. trope invokes Rush Limbaugh (??) for you, then…yikes! Perhaps you need to read a little more widely on the Romantic era and listen a little less to talk radio!

Thomas
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Oh, never mind.

Thanks for joining the discussion, Robin!

Thomas
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I’d keep my own editorial comments pithy and few. I’d be chucking a lot, too, like Emerson’s poetry, most of Clare, Melville’s poetry (Christ, no one even read his *prose* in the 19th century), cutting a lot of that mid-19th century French poetry which we’ve all read before, and I would also downplay work which is not orignal, but gained a reputation in the ivory tower only because it pleased modern tastes later in the 20th century, without having affected the people who lived in the 19th century one bit. Would this make me leave out Dickinson? I’d probably do something wry and include the poem of hers that was published in the 19th century with Emerson named as author. I would give the reader a sense of reading as if they were in the era itself, including newspaper articles and literary debates of the time. I would include as much 18th century material as possible, to make the reader aware of how much romanticism occured before the 19th century. Oh, I would definitely have fun.

Thomas
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I forgot Kant, Hegel, Voltaire, Godwin, Schiller, Beethoven, Southey, Ruskin…

Thomas
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Here’s my part 2 answer to your question, just off the top of my head:

I have no problem including prose or prose writers (Rothenberg does that to some extent, too)

I’d have more stuff with a Byronic, cutting, edge like “The House of Mourning” by Keats and “Letter to B.” by Poe.

I would include:

Thomas Carlyle (the Ezra Pound of the 19th century)

Margaret Fuller

Hawthorne

Charles Brockden Browne and George Lippard, Bryant, Irving and Cooper

Franklin, Jefferson, Russell, Pitt, statesman, etc

Whittier, Cranch, Alcott, Stowe, Ellery Channing, Jones Very

George Santayana, Irving Babbitt

William and Henry James

Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Helen Whitman, Frances Osgood

Dumas, Disraeli, Wilde

William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes

Samuel F.B. Morse

Freneau

More folk songs and spirituals

Also, I would feature the following:

Newspapers, journals, diaries, what did non-artists, presidents, kings & queens, tyrants, Napolean, etc think of romanticism?

Precedents in Greek, Roman poets, troubadors, Milton’s ‘Comus’ etc

Looking Back: Such things as ‘From Poe to Valery’ by T.S. Eliot (1949)

And finally, resistances to Romanticism: Franklin, Burke, Poe, Irving Babbitt

Thomas
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That’s funny: sudden fit of fastidiousness! I like the alliteration. I was just asking for a few names and titles, not a whole bibliography, since you seem to know a lot about 19th Century American poetry. Oh well.
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Blake’s America? That’s been done to the death. The reason the book is “atrocious” is there’s so much that’s old, and what discoveries there are don’t throw any light on the old, nor do the combinations of old produce anything new; there’s no frisson whatsoever. The book doesn’t DO anything.

When you write the following:

“But, since this isn’t a book of history, but rather of poetry, it seems your questions are a bit beside the point.”

You sound like those New Critics who insist we make a choice between poetry and history.

Why force the distinction? Especially when one is a transgressive modern who revels in blurring the lines between poetry and everything else, anyway? Why the sudden fit of fastidiousness?

Now you want me to reveal my own bibliographical ideas in a couple of minutes? If only the editors of this book had come here and got feedback before they began their years of research!

If the book is simply Rothenberg’s favorite poetry between certain dates, that’s fine, and transgressions over time can be presented ahistorically and even presented as timeless examples of transgression, I suppose, but my feeling is that an educated audience might want something more nuanced.

Emerson and Whitman speak to us transgressively every time we read them; in the context of this volume they say the same thing again. Is Rothenberg anxious to gain new converts to Emerson and Whitman? To make it OK to like Sade AND Emerson? To point out that there’s all sorts of ways to be naughty? I have no idea what he’s trying to say to an educated audience, never mind one who might need educating.

From Ben Franklin, the 18th century pragmatist, to Oscar Wilde, the 19th century wit, there is little difference, because the soul of wit is brevity–and this is a mere practical consideration.

I find no wit in this book whatsoever. Never mind history.

Thomas
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