In “The Motive of the Magazine,” her editorial statement
in the first issue of Poetry, Harriet Monroe wrote: “The
arts especially have need of 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....The present venture is a modest effort to give poetry
her own place, her own voice.”1
1
Harriet Monroe, “The Motive of the Magazine,”
Poetry, 1.1 (October 1912): 26-27.
