Famous Single Poems
A most interesting letter dealing with this question—interesting because so entirely frank—was written by Mrs. Elizabeth Akers Allen a year or two before her death.
“My publishers tell me that nobody buys books of poems in these days,” Mrs. Allen writes, “so I have no courage to offer another volume. As most of the publishing houses seem to have changed into mere job-printing offices, publishing nothing for which they are not paid in advance, or which they cannot pick up for nothing, there seems small encouragement for verse-writers who are not prepared to hire their books printed. Considering these things, I do wonder who buys all the compilations of verse which every year brings out, if it is true that ‘nobody reads poetry.’
“Another thing puzzles me. When I know that the scholarly and experienced Professor Lowell never declined a poem of mine while he edited the Atlantic, and that Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Underwood, Stedman, and many lesser lights of the literary world here and in England, have included my work in their selections, when I have over sixty sheets of music which have been written by composers (utter strangers to me) to words of mine which they have either taken from my books or have picked out of newspaper columns and appropriated without my knowledge, and when I am
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