Word: juvenilia
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However, "our primary aim in selecting material for this anthology has been to form a collection of the juvenilia of outstanding men. Within this limit, we have generally tried to choose the best material available." But, the preface continues, "in some cases, it should be stated, the editor has chosen not to print the best of a particular author's Advocate work, printing instead work of his which has not been republished in book form...
This collecting of juvenilia could cause a revolution in the arts. We can imagine a concert of those pieces composed by Mozart before he reached the age of three--not his best, of course, only those not previously heard. Or a hanging of sketches done by Pieasse while attending grammar school in Spain. Since some of the pieces in this anthology were written by men who later became well known in fields quite removed from the world of letters (a selection by Theodore Roosevelt concerns various football teams of 1879), it may be possible to uncover some clay figurines sculptured...
Every so often some precocity in pigtails mesmerizes a U. S. publisher into printing her verse creations. The resultant rash on the nation's body poetic generally passes away as soon as the publisher's advertising appropriation has been spent. Oh Millersville! is a collection of juvenilia that no American will want to see pass away...
When a writer is dead, his admirers feel that at least he is now safe: there will be no senile juvenilia from him. Then comes the literary executor. And the executor publishes more, and more, and more posthumous stuff, each batch a little feebler than the last. Such was the case with Katherine Mansfield; such is now the case with A. E. Housman. Admirers of Housman who have to sit helplessly by while his brother Laurence continues his well-meaning but damaging publications may well feel that the line from A Shropshire...
...inescapable conclusion from this glorification of juvenilia was that the younger you are, the better child art you are likely to produce. At about junior high-school age, or sixth grade, many of the child painters had turned imitative, muddying the pure well of crudity with inhibited attempts to be artistic. But under this age, the hugely scrawled and brightly colored pictures done by little boys & girls showed a splashing freedom of imagery and sometimes a direct seizure of character. They also showed frequent resemblance to the art of those moderns who distort for the sake of design...