POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
EDITORIAL COMMENT
THE QUESTION OF PRIZES
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IT is impossible to please everybody! Poetry 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,
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