This Is What (Almost) Perpetual Copyright Looks Like
From this Guardian article:
"When John Clare died of a stroke on May 20 1864, aged 70, he was almost a forgotten figure. For 23 years he had been confined in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, which he called "the purgatorial hell and French bastile of English liberty, where harmless people are trapped and tortured until they die". He is now recognised as the finest and most prolific of all English rural poets, as important as his contemporaries Keats, Shelley and Byron.
"But the growing interest in Clare and increasing demand for new editions of his work have exposed a literary imprisonment almost as cruel, certainly as unusual, as the one he suffered in the "bastile" at Northampton. The case has united such high-profile Clare enthusiasts as Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, in a campaign to "free" the poet. For, amazingly, 136 years after Clare's death, the copyright to most of his writings is still claimed as private property by a single individual.
"Professor Eric Robinson, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has for the past 35 years claimed to own the copyright to Clare's unpublished writings. He has enforced this claim, demanding acknowledgement and often payment from anyone who wishes to publish Clare material. In the view of Tim Chilcott, the effect has been "the impoverishment of editorial debate compared with other Romantic writers, the absence of challenging alternative views, the deadening hand of the authorised 'definitive version'." ...
Via Crooked Timber.
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February 1, 2006 03:42 PM