Life, 1920-05-20 · page 30 of 48
Life — May 20, 1920 — page 30: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes poets exploiting inflated food prices during wartime profiteering. The main article contrasts how people condemn butchers and tradesmen for price-gouging while ignoring that poets profit handsomely from their work. The cartoon "Life's Darkest Moments: Sold Out" (top) shows a circus barker turning away customers—a visual joke about scarcity and "sold out" signs during shortages. The satire's central example: Edgar Allan Poe's famous line "And the Raven never flitting, still is sitting" originally sold for perhaps 10-15 cents per line. Modern editors compress it to "And the Raven / Still is sitting" (fewer words, same price), doubling the poet's per-word earnings—a 500% markup. The author mocks how poets publicly lament food costs while secretly enjoying these "pattern" changes that pad their profits. The "In Newport" vignette jokes about wealthy society gossip, unrelated to the main theme.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
SSS ANOS fe WA Nt { ‘\ port T CARE iF YA RS HAVE Come Tomes! VTecc yA WE'RE SLO | OUT! THEY Airey A INCH LEFT Wt Tet’ BIG TOP Art TH LOCAL AUTHORITIES \ Wont LETUS TARE IM, AMOTHER SOULE GETME: | DARKEST MOMENTS SOLD OUT Poetic Profiteering ALK overalls to bring down the about food profiteering; wear price of curse the men who fixed the and ask what the coming to when bricklayers are clothing income tax, world is making than and dressmakers’ more professors, cutters than art critics, Go to the retreat and he will groan but all the while he is the worst profiteer of them all “It is enough to make a saint tremble,” as the unapproachable Margery would ay, to think of the profits of some poet frend, over it as loudly as the rest, these very poets, whose faces are contorted with agony over what the butcher is charging their It is doubt- them, are shaking down .on es. Take the ful if he own cof Poe. ot more than ten or fifteen cents a line for “The Raven,” and yet look what used to be considered a line in those days: And the Raven never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, On the Pallid bust of Pallas, just chamber door. above my Picture the process through which these same lines would pass in order to fit them for one of our modern poetry n Leaving out the intermediate stzge: casy to see how the fever woula have into the poet’s blood with this final r And azine, it is he Raven tt @ On the’ paltic OF Ps Just My chamber Door! When computed, this ct covered to represent a profit of dred per cent. and while the lay may feel that it makes the poem res a wounded snake dragging its slow | vet Will see it this along, the which demanded exact Sometimes the poets are not quite at first what the “pattern” is. An ¢ who lately had occasion to purchase hy the line, reports that between ance of one bit of v libre a changes by the auth Ah’s" : <a the recent week's rise in lication, enough “ food Constance Murray Gre In Newport Rs. PENOBSCO' Il married, aren't they daughters ood gracious, yes!—and divorced” Duc THERE GOES OLD HIRAM TURTLE AGAIN, TELLING ABOUT THE FRESHET OF 154! HE'S EITHER OUR OLDEST INHARITANT OR OUR BIGGEST LIAR comicbooks.com