Explore "The Cry of the Publisher" by Harry Graham on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
O my Author, do you hear the Autumn calling? / Does its message fail to reach you in your den, / Where the ink that once so sluggishly was crawling / Courses swiftly through your stylographic pen? / 'Tis the season when the editor grows active, / When the office-boy looks longingly to you. / Won't you give him something novel and attractive / To review?
Never mind if you are frivolous or solemn, / If you only can be striking and unique, / The reviewers will concede you half a column / In their literary journals, any week. / And 'twill always be your publisher's ambition / To provide for the demand that you create, / And dispose of a gigantic first edition, / While you wait.
O my Author, can't you pull yourself together, / Try to expiate the failures of the past, / And just ask yourself dispassionately whether / You can't give us something better than your last? / If you really -- if you truly -- are a poet, / As you fancy -- pray forgive my being terse -- / Don't you think you might occasionally show it / In your verse?