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