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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the preface of the collective edition of his poems published the year before his death, Lowell laments the fact that there is no escaping responsibility for the printed page. “Ilka mon maun dree his weird,” he reminds his reader; and he goes on to say that, but for the “avenging litera scripta manet,” he “would gladly suppress or put into the Coventry of smaller print in an appendix” a good many things that he had with much reluctance admitted into this edition. There can be no doubt that Lowell was sincere in this avowal; but it would be a mistake to infer from what he says that he made no attempt to escape the avenging fate which he declares to be inevitable. For from this final edition he took pains to exclude not only all his juvenilia, but likewise a goodly number of his verses published after he had attained to manhood, and some, even, that he had written in his mature old age. By my count, he omitted from this final collective edition a total of 181 poems that had hitherto been published. He retained in this edition a total of 260 poems (I count the “Biglow Papers” as a single poem and each of the sonnets or sonnet groups as single items); so that out of a grand total of 441 poems published up to the time of the preparation of his final edition he sacrificed a little more than forty percent.
1 The Writings of James Russell Lowell, Riverside edition, VII, p. v, Boston, 1890.
2 Lowell was fond of this formula; see his Poems, Cambridge Edition, pp. 205, 341; his Letters, ed. C. E. Norton, I, p. 379, II, p. 251; a letter to J. P. Kennedy, Sewanee Review, XXV, p. 207; and Scudder's Life of Lowell, II, p. 395.
3 I include in these figures the lines entitled “The Poet and Apollo” attributed to Lowell by H. E. Joyce in Modem Language Notes, XXXV, p. 250; the sonnet on “Charles Dickens” published in Appleton's Journal, IV, p. 591 (see Modern Language Notes, XXXVIII, p. 221); several poems first mentioned by Chamberlain and Livingston, First Editions of the Writings of James Russell Lowell, but not elsewhere recorded; and eight poems conjecturally assigned to Lowell by Scudder in the list of the poet's writings appended to Ms Life of Lowell, II, pp. 421ff. I leave out of account several fragments of poems embodied by Lowell in one or another of his collected essays; and I naturally omit from the reckoning all poems that first appeared after the publication of the latest collection made by the poet.
I owe it to Mr. George Willis Cooke to say, that without the aid of his Bibliography of James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1906), it would have been well nigh impossible for me to collect the information on which this paper is based.
4 See his letter to Poe of May 8, 1843, published by Woodberry in his Life of Poe, II, pp. 26, 27.
5 See Scudder, I, p. 71.
6 See Scudder, I, pp. 352f.
7 Scudder suggests (II, p. 407) that the poet hoped to be able to bring out another collection of his poems before his death.