The expensive business of quoting poetry

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers? 

This week I published a new book in which I spend a lot of time discussing the work of other writers. The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading is a canter through children’s literature from Aesop and Anonymous to J.K. Rowling and Julia Donaldson. A lot of what I wanted to discuss was out of copyright (it’s perhaps in bad taste to thank Margaret Wise Brown for having died in 1952 rather than living on till 1954, but it did let me do a line-by-line close reading of her immortal masterpiece Goodnight Moon); a fair bit was not.

It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. And the process was mostly rather heartening. Not much more than £100 secured me the right to quote the stanza of W.H. Auden’s wonderful ‘September 1st, 1939’ from which my book takes its title as the epigraph. I consider that a bargain. Julia Donaldson was super-generous in allowing me to quote from The Gruffalo. The great Allan Ahlberg asked a peppercorn for me to quote a few lines from Each, Peach, Pear, Plum. 

But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem about Christopher Robin saying his prayers – and my publishers advised me, if I didn’t want to pay, to snip it out.