Frosty reception

I've been out exploring the googlesphere to find the text of the 88-year-old Robert Frost poem, "War Thoughts at Home," recently discovered by grad student Robert Stilling and published in the new edition of Virginia Quarterly Review. Given that one can find online the full text of thousands of books written before and after 1918, find the full text of Rep. Mark Foley's IM chats and emails, find endless accounts of the informal genetic experiments of celebrities, full-length pre-release Hollywood movies, 911 call audio, and every bad poem written in the last decade somewhere on the internet, I assumed this would be an easy search. Nada—locked up tighter than the next Harry Potter. Four lines here, four lines there, no more.

There's something out of whack in our notion of intellectual property. Robert Frost is, I am sorry to report, long dead. But through the endless legal extension of copyright beyond the lives of the artists whose right to benefit from their own work it was intended to protect, we are instead cutting ourselves off from the richness of our own cultural legacy. The estates and publishers of long-dead artists cling to their debatable rights more fiercely as time goes by. The text of the poem appeared briefly on one website, and was forcibly removed within hours. Ironically, the only new intellectual property associated with the discovery, Robert Stilling's account of the find, is posted on the VQR website for all the world to read for free. I was happy to read it; it's an interesting story. But I will pay VQR's $25 subscription price in order to read the poem online, only if they can promise to bring back Robert Frost to collect his cut. It isn't as if I can't walk over to the Owen D. Young Library and read the current issue for free. Frost himself probably took a similar walk around the St. Lawrence campus when courting his bride-to-be.