Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/320

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

T is impossible to please everybody! has been criticized in various quarters because of its annual honor list. When the question of prizes came up for discussion recently in New York, at a meeting of the Poetry Society of America, the associate editor of this magazine was almost the only speaker who advocated prize-giving for the encouragement of the art. By other speakers—and since then by two or three writers—various objections have been suggested: that the offering and giving of prizes is mere sentimentalism and pretentiousness; that justice in awards is improbable, or even impossible; that there is a subtle corruption in a prize, the winner thereof becoming so consumed with self-satisfaction as to lose his artistic integrity; that such awards are an effort to create, not poetry, but a market for poetry—an effort to "make poetry popular." Et cetera.

So we may as well refer once more to a few first principles which led to the founding of the magazine. The fundamental principle was perhaps this: that a great period, in any department of human activity, comes only when a strong and widespread creative impulse meets an equal impulse of sympathy. Genius happens individually, of course; and, having happened even at the darkest place and hour, it may discover itself and function to a certain degree,