I've tried Eudora's "resend" command on this message, but it doesn't seem
to have worked. So here comes a straight cut-and-paste-and-send job.
Apologies for any duplication.
 
JM
 
--------
 
From: "Michael Coyle" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re:      Eliot: closure
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 10:52:44 +0300
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Dear Jonathan,
 
I would like to have posted this little note to your message to the Pound
list, but I am in London for the term and the Pound list doesn't accept
posts from from from this address. Perhaps you would be kind enough to
forward it for me; I'd appreciate it. The note is simple, but makes a big
difference with regard to how anyone thinks of Pound. Pound himself *never*
used the phrase "The Pound Era," and would have been embarrassed had anyone
else done so in his hearing. It was Hugh Kenner who coined the phrase, and
his ambitious "The Pound Era" was published immediately before EP's death,
or immediately after: I can't remember which right now, but either way EP
was past caring. Kenner had conferred with EP many times, of course, but I'm
fairly certain he hadn't told EP what he intended to cal his second
full-length book on Pound's work. There are many Pound scholars today,
myself included, who have begun the work of historicizing Pound, and have
been doing so by reflecting on how it is that our own criticcal
methodologies shape what we see or don't see. I've written about this
question not only in my book (which, incidentally is largely about Pound's
relations to Ruskin---but the Pound list didn't accept my post), *Ezra
Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture*, but also in an essay
review of four years ago:  "A Present with Innumerable Pasts: Postmodernity
and the Tracing of Modernist Origins," in *Review*, ed. James A. Hoge
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996).
        I'm glad for your post, because I think you're very right that the
recent change in copyright law has huge implications for readers and
critics.  I also think you're right that such a law would have been
unnecessary in the 19th century.
 
Cheers,
 
Michaael Coyle
e-mail address in London until mid-May: mailto:[log in to unmask]
 
 
> I still haven't found Eliot's "_Ulysses_, Order, and Myth" online, and now
> I know why: because I'd thought it was published in 1922, but it was
> actually published in 1923.
>
> That one-year error makes all the difference, for reasons most of you
know.
> Until recently, books published in the United States passed into the
public
> domain 75 years after first publication. That meant 1997 was a great year:
> the year _The Waste Land_ became available for $1 in a Dover Thrift
> Edition. Eliot, who really would have preferred that people on a budget
> stick to their folk dancing, rolled over in his grave. Of more moment,
> Charles Scribner's Sons began lobbying hard for a change in the copyright
> law. It still makes money from _The Great Gatsby_, and it wants to keep on
> doing so. Still worse, the time was fast approaching when Mickey Mouse
> might cross into the free trade zone.
>
> So the law changed. As it now stands, 1922 is the terminus ad quem for the
> 75-year rule. For publication dates from 1923 on, books stay in copyright
> for 95 years.
>
> From a literary-historical point of view, that change in the law is
> interesting for the way it reflects literary reality. If the twentieth
> century had turned out like the nineteenth or the seventeenth, the
> lawmakers might not have had to act. Do Keats or Jonson pass into the
> public domain toward the end of their centuries? No problem; there's still
> money to be made from Tennyson or Dryden. Some centuries are productive
all
> the way through. But in the eighteenth century most of the important work
> was done in the first half, and as of now it appears the twentieth century
> also followed that pattern.
>
> Which raises this question: are we ready yet to try thinking of Pound's
> phrase "The Pound Era" the way we think of a phrase like "The Age of Pope"
> -- i.e., not the way Pound had in mind, with the emphasis on the word
> "Pound," but the way a future historian might think of it, with the
> emphasis on the word "age"? Do you suppose we're ready yet to start
> historicizing Pound? Is he ready yet to be thought of as the warp of a
> historical fabric, one in which language (his and others') and history
(his
> and others') come together in a conceptual whole? Would it be worthwhile,
> for instance, to think of an anthology arranged radially, with Pound at
the
> center and other poets discussed in terms of their linguistic relation to
him?
>
> And a note to Christopher Booth: for interesting information about changes
> in the copyright law, I'm indebted to your McGraw-Hill colleague Dimpna
> Figuracion.
>
> Jonathan Morse