In many issues of Poetry Hariet Monroe, the long-standing editor of the magazine, included editorial commentary in the form of an essay at the end of the publication. The purpose of such statements was usually to make clear her oppinion on a social or political issue as it pretained to poetry and the publication of poets. One such publication titled "Hard Times Indeed" which argues for the functionality of the poet in: "a strenuous age, of universal locomotion, war and other bedevilments"(308).The statment is made in response to an annonymous submission in the Atlantic Monthly which asserts: "art is dead under the curse of universal locomotion"(308). The submitee goes on to say that were a "minor poet" try to emerge admist the rubble of the modern world, he would: "...wake up in these days to find himself a child in a world of energetic, serious maturity"(308). What follows in her essay is a re-quoting of her opponent and a rebuttle made with cheer-leader like enthusiasm only equaled by present-day infomercial hosts or--dare I say-- democratic politicains in debade:
Were Coleridge, Keats, Shelley—
many others—struck dumb by the terrible and noble facts
of the Napoleonic wars?—yet these singers of "clouds and
leaves and elfin things" were minor poets to their contemporaries.
Did any one of them hush his "sweet-chiming
words" to "leave more room for the great songs sure to
come?" No, for he knew that the great song, the great
work of art, is merely the highest tree of a forest, rarely an
isolated miracle.(309)
The show made of these annonymous statements is an example of what Mark Morrisson calls: "...the advertising value of spectacle..."(121) in "Marketing British Modernism." Since Poetry not only touted it's variety of poets, both new and emerging, it also kept its final pages as a kind of discussion forum where ideas about art, poetry and contemporary poets could be written upon by their excitable colleauges. Monroe and Pound were often at the center of the ring, and their excitable literary personalities made the editorials as much of a draw to the magazine as the poetry itself.
