In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an
organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its
own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them.
The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of
power, if they are to do their work and be heard. For as the world grows
greater day by day, as every member of it, through something he buys or
knows or loves, reaches out to the ends of the earth, things precious to
the race, things rare and delicate, may be overpowered, lost in the
criss-cross of modern currents, the confusion of modern immensities.
Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the great cities of
the world; and every week or two a new periodical is born to speak for
one or the other of them, and tenderly nursed at some guardian's
expense. Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is
whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered,
willy-nilly, by men's material needs. Poetry alone, of all the fine
arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its
immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose
triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and
distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and
glamour.
Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process
as unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like
every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal
relation between the artist and his public. The people must do their
part if the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must
cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as the rose.
The present venture is a modest effort to give to poetry her own place,
her own voice. The popular magazines can afford her but scant
courtesy--a Cinderella corner in the ashes--because they seek a large
public which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their verse
but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their
literature, even in prose. Most magazine editors say that there is no
public for poetry in America; one of them wrote to a young poet that the
verse his monthly accepted "must appeal to the barber's wife of the
Middle West," and others prove their distrust by printing less verse
from year to year, and that rarely beyond page-end length and
importance.
We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and
that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in
this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance. In this belief
we have been encouraged by the generous enthusiasm of many subscribers
to our fund, by the sympathy of other lovers of the art, and by the
quick response of many prominent poets, both American and English, who
have sent or promised contributions.
We hope to publish in _Poetry_ some of the best work now being done in
English verse. Within space limitations set at present by the small size
of our monthly sheaf, we shall be able to print poems longer, and of
more intimate and serious character, than the popular magazines can
afford to use. The test, limited by ever-fallible human judgment, is to
be quality alone; all forms, whether narrative, dramatic or lyric, will
be acceptable. We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a
green isle in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and Truth,
austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, may
follow her brave quest unafraid.