Let me stress yet again, too, that it is not a matter of quality. Many of the songs we are talking of are excellent, musically and poetically. If I were editing an anthology of 20th Century Verse, then, alongside the Yeats and the Eliot and the Wallace Stevens and the e e cummings, I should certainly include The Streets Of London and The Lonely Death Of Hattie Carroll. But that doesn't make them folksongs, any more than the Yeats et al.

So why go on calling them so FCOL? Miaouw, sez Cleo, sitting here beside me on my desk: obstinate creature -- why, I've just told her again that she's a dog.

≈M≈