CHAPTER EIGHT

The Magic World between Covers

One day late in 1923 or early in 1924, I walked into the offices of a newly established publishing firm, and spoke with Earle H. Balch, later to be editor-in-chief of Putnams--a handsome young man of about thirty, with one of the most ingratiating smiles I can remember. Also, I met Melville Minton, the future President of Putnams, whose death not long ago caused widespread regret in publishing circles; at the time of our meeting, he was a debonaire book salesman in early middle life, and had joined forces with Balch to form the firm of Minton, Balch and Company.

My object in seeing Balch was to present an idea for an anthology of poetry. In the course of my reviewing and miscellaneous reading, I had come across many poets, some of them unknown or virtually unknown, whose work seemed worthy of preservation; these, published along with examples from the writings of more celebrated authors, would provide a valuable cross-section of contemporary American poetry. At the same time, I hoped to avoid a confusion already becoming common: the confusion of bracketing indisputable poetry together with work not recognizable as poetry by any standard known before the second decade of this century.

Balch was sufficiently interested to ask me to draw up a prospectus and a list of tentative inclusions, which, needless to say, I did very gladly. And there came a happy day, not many weeks later, when I was told that my prospectus had been approved, and that I would be commissioned to compile an anthology, for which Balch proposed the title, _Modern American Lyrics_.

Alas, on that bright day, I was still to be educated in the trials, heartaches, and problems of an anthologist.

Those trials, heartaches, and problems were by no means to be exclusively literary. On the contrary, they were primarily as non-literary as a contract to buy wheat or potatoes. And this was because you could not simply dig into the bin of contemporary poetry, and pick whatever you wished without reference to copyright holders. None, of course, will question that this is as it should be; the author and the publisher must be protected in the use of their product. On the other hand, this makes the compilation of an anthology something like the running of a hurdle race; and the roadblock it establishes may be less damaging to the anthologist than to the poets he hopes to represent. Back in the twenties, however, the situation was less discouraging than it has since become. Permissions to reprint were easier to obtain, and the requested fees were fewer and more moderate; in later years the very making of anthologies--one of the chief means by which less known poets may gain an audience and a chance for survival--has been all but prohibited except to compilers and publishers with wide resources.

As a verse-writer, I endorse the principle that poets should be paid for the use of their material in compilations; but as an anthologist, I can testify that this is not always possible. My publishers did agree to allow a certain sum to be deducted from royalties and applied to fees for permissions; I cannot recall whether the amount was one hundred dollars, or two hundred; in any event, it was small enough. When I asked permission, for example, to reprint a poem by Robert Frost--not then, nor at any time, one of my favorite poets--the requested price of twenty-five dollars gave me such a budgetary headache that I saw no choice except to do without Frost. And when I wrote to a certain writer, whose poem in a current magazine was one of those borderline cases that had caused me much hesitation, the author solved all my doubts when he wrote in from Europe, asking the compensation of twenty dollars--his poem, so far as I know, remains unanthologized until this day.

This occurrence, however, was wholly exceptional; every other poet I consulted was willing, even eager to have his work appear regardless of remuneration; it was the publishers who gave the trouble, when there was trouble (though many of them were most cooperative). Thus, there was the case of the poet who wrote me, “I’d be delighted to have you use my poems, without charge. But the copyright, unfortunately, is owned by the publishers; and they are certain to ask fees, maybe more than you are prepared to pay.” It occurred to me, therefore, that it would be poor strategy to consult the publishers; and so I wrote back to the author: “I notice that your book was published years ago. If it is no longer selling, the publishers probably have no further use for the copyright, and will release it to you upon request. After that, I can apply directly to you for reprint permission.” Sometime later, I had a letter from the author, stating that he had followed my suggestion, that the copyright was now his, and that he granted me permission to reprint his work.

In another instance, in which I wished to use several poems by one writer, I applied to the publishers who had issued his books years before; and was asked a fee that would have made my budget totter. Being in communication with the author, I notified him of the request, and he wrote back hotly: “The publishers you mention no longer have any rights in my work. The rights were taken over by K, my present publisher, who has stipulated that I have absolute disposition of the reprint privileges. I therefore grant you the permission you ask--and don’t be foolish enough to pay the first publishers a fee.”

Still another writer granted permission with this peculiar warning: “Don’t under any circumstances write to my publishers to confirm this consent, though you should, of course, print the usual acknowledgment to them. This letter is sufficient and final.” It was indeed sufficient and final; neither in this case, nor in any other connected with any of the four anthologies I have compiled, has any person challenged my right of inclusion.

An anthologist, I found, has to be nothing so much as a letter-writer; my correspondence was voluminous, far more so than I could have foreseen, and seemed never-ending. Letters began coming in from all variety of sources, along with manuscripts, magazines, and books of poems with suggestions for inclusion. But how did this happen? Did I advertise for material? Naturally not. Nevertheless, a sort of underground publicity campaign was at work, and one not of my deliberate making. When I wrote, for example, to poet Phil Brown asking permission to reprint his sonnet _Midsummer_, Phil might be so elated that--with no thought at all of advertising my forthcoming compilation--he would mention my letter to his verse-writing friends Joe Thompson and Ed Williams; and Joe and Ed, seeing no reason to go unrepresented when Phil was to be included, would write me nominating themselves as candidates for anthologizing, and would send quantities of their work in support of the nomination, in some cases whole floods of volumes. The result was not, I am sorry to say, a vast increase in acceptable material; the result was an immense addition to my own labors, since most of the volunteered material was of poor quality, some of it atrociously bad. Already, I fear, though I had set out with the best of intentions, I was making enemies among poets--the editor’s inevitable lot, since no way yet has been invented of making every submitted manuscript acceptable.

Errors of judgment in selection do, of course, occur, and must occur, though no two persons may agree as to what the particular mistakes have been. Other errors, too, as I learned with deep pain, may creep in, though there was nothing to parallel the case of one of my own subsequent printed poems, in which “flashing reel” became converted into “fishing reel.” But things seemed bad enough when an author wrote me with a justifiable sense of injury that her sonnet had appeared in thirteen lines. This, indeed, was true, as I confirmed upon consulting the book; and it hardly helped matters that, so far as the sequence of ideas was concerned, the poem seemed not to have lost by the omission of the line. I did not know, and do not know to this day, whether the fault lay in an inexcusable error in proofreading, or in the careless last-minute dropping out of a bar of type by the printer, who was unaware that sonnets should come in fourteen lines; in any event, that error, though corrected in later editions, probably tormented me as much as it did the author.

There were actually two subsequent printings of _Modern American Lyrics_ as such, in addition to a joint printing with _Modern British Lyrics_, which first appeared in 1925. In connection with the combined volume--whose year of publication I cannot readily determine, since I lent my only copy to a friend, who never returned it--an incident occurs to me, doubtless a little irrelevant to the present discussion, but perhaps worth telling. One summer several years after the birth of the two anthologies, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco; and my eyes fell upon a volume entitled _Modern Lyrics_. Automatically I picked it up, and lo and behold! I saw my own name as compiler! What was that? Did I suffer from acute amnesia, causing forgetfulness of my own actions? How could I be the editor of an anthology that I did not even know I had compiled?

A hasty examination, however, showed that the book was nothing more nor less than _Modern American Lyrics_ and _Modern British Lyrics_ united under a single cover. But what was this firm of Loring and Mussey, whose name I read on the title page? A combine of pirates?

Considerably confused, I wrote to Earle Balch, and in the normal course received the explanation. His firm had sold the reprint rights to Loring and Mussey, as it was entitled to do by contract, but had forgotten to notify me of the deal. In due time, I would receive my share of the returns, as provided by our agreement.

As I look back over the preface of _Modern American Lyrics_, I find that same effort to distinguish poetry from pseudo-poetry which, rightly or wrongly, has remained one of my preoccupations throughout the years. In referring to pseudo-poetry, I was chiefly concerned, then as now, with certain innovators who, it seemed to me, were abandoning poetry for the sake of novelty, were turning out transparently disguised prose, and so were spreading confusion over the poetic world, and tending to make all poetry look ridiculous. Referring to certain modern compilations then recommended as good, I remarked:

Page after page ... is devoted to formless effusions whose music is less than the music of dignified prose; page after page is filled with the sordid things of everyday, with kitchen sinks and bathtubs and cobblestones and loveless adulteries. And if in the interlude--as frequently occurs--one comes across a glowing sentiment or memorable melody or flash of imagination that reveals wide vistas of the sun-tinged storm-clouds or of the starry night-skies, then one is likely to be plunged in the next page into the monologue of a real estate agent if not into an epic of the hog-pens.

If I were to write this in regard to the anthologies of today, there would not be a word I would have to reconsider, except that the phrase “as frequently occurs” might now seem an overstatement.

Even before the appearance of _Modern American Lyrics_, I had made my bid for recognition in a collection, _The Thinker and Other Poems_. Doubtless I was as proud of this as most writers are of their first published masterpieces; but let me hasten to add that I am proud of it no longer, nor have I been for many a year. I would perhaps not go so far as one poet I once heard of, who offered a handsome price for copies of his first book; and having retrieved quite a few at considerable cost and trouble, disposed of them all in one great bonfire, in the hope of thus extirpating all trace of his youthful folly. But if I would not seek to emulate this holocaust, the reason is that I see no need for the poet himself to weed out what time is certain to obliterate. I will not say that _The Thinker_ does not truthfully embody much of the thought, feeling, and imagination of my youth. But in glancing back over the poems (a form of self-chastisement I rarely submit myself to), I find few if any that I would not present in different garments were I writing them today. Then why do I not revise them? Because life goes on to new impulses and expressions, and it would be as difficult to return to the mood and outlook of yesterday as to go back to the haunts of one’s childhood.

I must not give the impression that any publisher was waiting with outstretched hands for this early darling of my heart. Then, as now, no publisher was enthusiastic about the chance to lose money; then, as now, it was difficult to find a market for poetry, though markedly less so than it has since become. Even while in California, I had been in contact with the firm of James T. White and Company, which issued occasional books of verse, though its chief publication, if I remember rightly, was an encyclopedia of American biography (which, I believe, it still issues). One day sometime after my arrival in New York, I stepped into the offices of the firm at 70 Fifth Avenue, and saw Mr. White, a thin, aged, learned-looking man, whose hair matched his name; and also met his amiable editor, James B. Kenyon, probably then in his late sixties--the author of no less than nine books of verse and three of prose not unfamiliar to an earlier day, though I suspect that few nowadays remember him. The tone of his poems, which were not without quality even though lacking that supreme element which makes one poet soar above a thousand and surmount the generations, is indicated by these lines from _Reed Voices_ (James T. White, 1917):

’Mid the dusk reeds that fledge the twilight streams, Nature’s wild troubadours, the breezes, make Such strange sweet songs as echo through our dreams, And haunt our baffled memories when we wake.

To Mr. Kenyon, who received me in a friendly way, I showed some of my own poems; and his approval, while perhaps over-generous, naturally led to a discussion of the possible publication of a collection. It was some time before a way could be worked out; but finally it was decided that, if I could dispose of a certain number of copies, the firm would undertake the publication. Do not suppose that there was anything unusual or degrading about such an arrangement; it was then and has since become even more decisively the rule among first books of verse, most of which would otherwise never see the light--and if the first

## book does not see the light, what of the second, and the third? As a

matter of fact, I did not stand to lose much (nor was I financially able to lose much), for I knew where I could dispose of numbers of copies, even though I did not yet realize that many acquaintances who will buy a first book out of good will or curiosity would no sooner purchase a second than they would subscribe for shares in a company dedicated to raising white elephants. I did not, of course, personally solicit sales; but the company circularized a list of names provided by me. Bookstore sales counted for little if anything; but there was one store that did sell quite a few copies--a store such as, I would hazard a guess, has rarely if ever, before or since, dealt in books of verse. A cousin of mine, a bright and literate woman who was always especially kind to me, ran a sort of emporium of ladies’ goods on Washington Heights; and what should be added to the stock in trade but _The Thinker and Other Poems_! Recommended by the sagacious proprietor, this book went off into more than one home where poems were ordinarily in no great demand.

But already I was learning some of the trials of the young author. In my inexperience, I had given no thought to so important a matter as the size of the type to be used; and when I saw the proofs, I observed with a shock that the print was minute (actually, eight point, whereas nowadays I would approve nothing less than eleven or twelve point). So hard was the book to peruse that its author, after it came out, could never read more than a poem or two at a time, and rarely subjected his eyes to this much strain. You may say that this had the advantage of keeping down the number of readers, but I am sure no such precaution was necessary. It may have been the small type, or it may have been mere ineptitude that caused me to miss a number of errors; one of them, in particular, seems considerably more amusing to me now than when I originally discovered it: my poem of tender sentiment, _On My Mother’s Photograph_, had come out, “On My Mother’s Phonograph.”

Despite the small print, despite the typographical errors, despite the amateurishness of many of the poems, _The Thinker_ was extensively and on the whole favorably reviewed; I received a gratifying wealth of clippings from papers ranging from New York to Puget Sound. I mention this, however, not with any sense of personal triumph, but because similar good luck does not befall books of verse by unknown writers today; a traditional collection such as mine, issued without advertising and under the imprint of a relatively obscure publisher, could now be certain to be ignored altogether outside the author’s home town, or at most would be honored by one or two three- or four-line notices from secondary organs. In this difference one can measure the extent to which poetry, in the course of several decades, has fallen in critical and general esteem.