FOR LOVE

In 1846, a young Princeton graduate named Charles Scribner started an independent publishing house with Isaac Baker. After Baker’s death in 1850, Charles Scribner and Company began to publish Scribner’s Magazine as well as theology, reference books, and children’s literature. It was Charles Scribner II who brought the company to their prestigious Fifth Avenue offices, complete with a bookstore on the first floor. With titles by Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Scribner’s became a major player in the world of literature and moved once again, in 1913, to the grand Ernest Flagg building at Fifth and Forty-eighth Street. Editors Maxwell Perkins and John Hall Wheelock (both Harvard graduates) and Charles Scribner III joined the firm, bringing a fresh perspective on contemporary literature that lead to the publication of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960 was published by Scribner’s in 1962. Although Scribner’s was independent, this was the first book of Creeley’s to reach a broader audience. Previous titles such as The Immoral Proposition (1953), The Kind of Act Of (1953), All That Is Lovely in Men (1955) were limited to a couple hundred copies and went out of print quickly. For Love is divided into three approximately equal sections that cover one decade of writing. The first two are basically The Whip and A Form of Women, while the third is all new work written between 1959 and 1960. The book closes with the title poem, “For Love.” I don't have Creeley's correspondence with Olson on hand, but I'd be curious to learn what, if any, discussion there was about Scribner's and the manuscript that became For Love. 

—KS