Sherry Chandler

Poetry Snark takes on Blurbs:

The short, unpleasant history of blurbs began on an appropriately bogus note. The first literary blurb in history was when Walt Whitman extracted a sentence from a private letter from Emerson and emblazoned the sage of Concord’s words on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson, of course, didn’t mean an academic career, but his choice of words seems rather telling in retrospect.

Whitman made this move without even asking Emerson, embarassing his benefactor before his friends. It wasn’t so much the actual words that caused chagrin, but the fact that Emerson’s uncouth Brooklyn friend would even make the move in the first place. Those days, Americans still had some sense of rightful shame in the face of shameless self-promotion. And publishers didn’t assume that readers needed to be told what what to read by a stranger.

Well, we all know what’s happened since. Blurbs are now considered universally necessary as promotional moves, even though poetry doesn’t sell. The blurbs themselves have evolved.

This post, which I invite you to read in its entirety, winds up beating a horse that’s looking pretty dead by now but the question it raises about the function of blurbs is a valid one.

I love my blurbs. They give me a warm glow when I read them, and some of them are poetry in themselves. I think good blurbs can open some bookstore doors for your poetry collection but I think they have their limitations.

What would happen to a blurbless poetry collection, I wonder. Would it fare any worse?