do you think in each instance I can footnote his emendations

Yes.

-o-

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…

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

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2. 125 years from creation or 31 December 2039 for unpublished works; and,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

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

..,

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

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….

…

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….

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