User:Originalylem/Humphrey Milford bio workpage

Cesar Franck: Link between accident and death
(One pathologist writing in 1970 observed that, although there might have been a link between Franck's injury in May and his illness and death in October-November, given the unavailability of antibiotics his terminal illness "could not be considered an unusual pattern for pneumonia in a man in his seventh decade." )

Possible Foss article reworked conclusion
In all his work, as composer, performer, editor, and promoter, Foss sought to bring native-born music and musicians into the mainstream of early twentieth-century English life. Writing in 1933, he discussed a long-held persuasion among the English that music came from elsewhere, that "England has always been a purchaser of music: . . . Handel and Mendelssohn are sufficient examples." He then attributed the reawakening of English interest in and liking for their own music to:


 * the influence of the romantic movement in poetry, as inspirational source or (in vocal music) as lyrics;


 * a reacquisition of folk-music as a basis for composition and a model for style; and


 * the rediscovery of the vast treasure of Tudor music, and the desire to both emulate and to find a contemporary equivalent for (especially) the contrapuntal singing voice, which had once made English music rarely equaled and never surpassed.

In consequence, Foss, builder of a musical publishing empire, supporter of Vaughan Williams and other English composers, promoter of the new presentation modes of broadcast and recording, could conclude: "England has climbed from the muddy lowlands of deserved neglect into a position of singular eminence . . . ." To this, Hinnells adds "But perhaps the ultimate endorsement of his work lies in the frequent performances and recordings of Vaughan Williams, Walton, Lambert, and Britten enjoyed by subsequent generations."


 * Foss, Hubert J. Music in My Time.  London: Rich & Cowan, 1933.
 * Warlock, Peter (Philip Heseltine). Frederick Delius.  Reprinted with Additions Annotations and Comments by Hubert Foss.  London: The Bodley Head, 1952.

=Milford=

Humphrey Sumner Milford (8 February 1877 – 6 September 1952) was an English publisher and editor who from 1913 to 1945 was Publisher to the University of Oxford and head of the London operations of Oxford University Press (OUP). In this work, he made OUP a major publisher world-wide of noteworthy books, music, and educational material for the general public, complementing the scholarly work of the Clarendon Press in Oxford. He himself edited volumes of works of Robert Browning, William Cowper, and Leigh Hunt and was principal editor of The Oxford Book of Regency Verse (later The Oxford Book of Romantic Verse). Upon publication of the final volume of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, he was among those awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University. He was knighted in 1936. His son by his first marriage was the composer Robin Milford, and his sister Violet Alice Milford was the mother of the poet and scholar Anne Ridler. In summing up his work, The Times of London cited his “unfailing catholicity”, “nose for a good book”, and “rare sense of the practicable”.

Life and Career
Charles Sumner

Literary Impact
Hundreds of OUP books still in circulation bear the imprint "Humphrey Milford Printer to the University". What part Milford played in the publishing process for each one varied tremendously. Some efforts involved his active and continuing participation from start to finish, selecting potential works and authors, editing manuscripts and proofs, and arranging for publicity, sales, and distribution. In other projects he played a more managerial role of monitoring his staff's work, providing guidance where necessary and approval at various stages, but leaving the main work to them. Alice Mary Smythe (later Alice Mary Hadley) gives a picture of the first end of the spectrum in describing her work on the first Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, for which she was named general editor. Once she had collected all of the candidate quotations, the Q[uotation] Committee was formed and met weekly for several years after. Milford often sat in on the discussions of whether a particular quotation should be included: it was he who formulated the standard that the candidate had to be so familiar that "one would expect to find it in The Times fourth leader." . (Milford maintained his interest in the Dictionary even after his retirement from the Press; up until shortly before his death he was proofing the pages of the second edition.  Charles Williams's plays contain allusions to "Caesar's" concern for every phase of every book issuing from Amen House.

Nevertheless, Milford never forgot his own background in literature, and he undertook throughout his career a number of personal projects contributing to English letters, specifically in the field of the romantic and nineteenth-century authors for whom he retained a particular fondness. He very much desired to make the literary achievements of this period better known and available to the reading public. His contributions include:


 * The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper (1905). This work was produced while Milford was still assistant to Canaan in Oxford, and (aside from its contribution to literature) indicates the then ambiguous relations between the OUP enterprises.  The book itself bridges the line between a scholarly examination of the texts of Cowper's poems (as then known) while being intended for popular circulation within the Oxford Standard Authors series.  (This was Milford's first formal publication for the Press, and both his residence within Oxford and his closeness in time to his former University studies may have formed his "academic" handling of a work intended for a more general readership.)  The book was printed at the press in Oxford, but carries Frowde's London imprint.  The original 1905 edition contains extensive notes on variations in the poems' texts as well as Milford's original research on the dating and context of the poems.  Over the course of decades the book was many times reprinted or republished with revisions, usually expansions and additions as more of Cowper's poems came to light.  By the latest edition of 1967 (more simply--and cautiously--titled Poetical Works) Milford's scholarly work of 1905 had been largely superseded, but his original selections, corrected and supplemented with the new material, still stood.


 * Poems of Clough (1910). Milford provided the first collection of Arthur Hugh Clough's poems since 1869 to use available original sources.  According to a contemporary reviewer, Milford's chief contribution in this collection is his analysis of Clough's development of a distinctive English hexameter as a medium for narrative poetry.  Milford proposed that Clough's work represented a turning point in the transition from early English attempts to mimic the Greek and Latin hexameter, based on syllable-count and quantity (as in Virgil's Aeneid), to a structure based on accent-count (as in  Longfellow's Evangeline) much more suitable to the speaking of English.  (The poems were read aloud over the BBC in 1958 and again in 1967. )  Clough's primary working-out of the accentual hexameter is in his The  Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich: "valuable for what it is, and even more valuable for what it foreshadows: the development of a music in English verse consciously based on stress as its governing law." .  Forty years later, the editors of the Oxford English Texts scholarly study of Clough's poems would cite Milford's preface as "the best account known to us of Clough's hexameters."


 * The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (1923).


 * The Oxford Book of Regency Verse (1928). Milford, with the help of Charles Williams and Frederick Page, selected the poems to be included in this collection, reprinted many times (retitled in 1935 The Oxford Book of Romantic Verse and again in 1958 The Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic Period) until it was finally succeeded by The New Oxford Book of Romantic Verse in 1993.  Milford's desire was to include the most (not necessarily just the best) work representative of the period.  "Not only are 'the majors so very major'", he wrote in his 1928 preface, "but the minors 'are so very minor.'"  He added that he had omitted some lesser works of great poets to make room for the best of lesser poets.  Such a collection "must also represent the minors--it must be historical, must show what was, in effect, happening, what was being written and read."


 * Robert Browning: Poetry and Prose (1941).

Regency Verse In collaboration w Fred Page and Ch Williams; advice of Prof David Nichol Smith; Phyllis Jones "ungrudging secretarial labors".

"Not only are 'the majors so very major', but the minors 'are so very minor'.

Milford regarded the title as unsatisfactory, but accepted it as "convenient, intelligible, and easily remembered."

"Some half of the book must, whoever its selector, have been occupied by poems which all readers will know, and many will know by heart. There can be no apology for this, because there can be no need for apology."

Some lesser works of great poets were omitted to make room for the best of lesser poets. Such a collection "must also represent the minors--it must be historical, must show what was, in effect, happening, what was being written and read."

Robert Browning

"It is more than usually difficult to make a satisfactory selection from Browning. There are few flawless poems, yet very few in which the reader does not come upon memorable lines or stanzas."

Chronological order enables us to relate each poem to Browning's inner and outer life; it shows "his essential identity of thought and feeling at the beginning and end of his life."

"More than fifty years have passed since Browning died: time enough, one would have thought, for his rank among English poets to be determined with reasonable certainty, and for his work to be assessed calmly and judicially. . . . But the half century has not been long enough: Browning is still attacked, almost as if he were alive.  This in itself is a tribute: a dead reputation needs no killing."

Why can one read Browning with enthusiasm? "Chiefly, perhaps because he is interested in so many things and --what is more important and much rarer--he conveys his interest to the reader."

The modern approach to Browning is not to examine his thought but "his insight into character, his flashing of light into dark places of the human mind, above all his delicate and profound handling of love". "It is as the poet of love that Browning attained and keeps his highest place."

Arthur Hugh Clough 1910 publish took 20 years to sell out (Norrington, Preface to Poems (1967), viii)

Leigh Hunt

Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Alice Mary Smith, later Alice Mary Hadley.

Personality
Rimi Chatterjee, in her history of the Press in India, says that Milford, like Canaan in Oxford, was part of and thoroughly at home with "the system"; both men considered themselves to be not businessmen but scholars bringing scholarly talents of broad knowledge and disciplined thinking to a business situation. Milford could be "formidable" to those with whom he was not familiar. She writes further that the elusiveness of Milford's personality extended to his physical presence: he could be in a room but remain unnoticed, "rather like a Cheshire cat, from which obscurity he would suddenly address his subordinates and make them jump."