Harriet Monroe, the founder and longtime editor of Poetry magazine, was the author of a large body of poems that captured the essence of urban industrial modernity. Her 1914 book, You and I ( Macmillan Company, New York), contains two poems about power generation.

The first, “The Turbine,” is an engineer’s ode to his turbine. The second, “A Power-Plant,” references Edison’s Fisk Street power plant in Chicago—the plant that housed GE’s first (5-MW) steam turbine generator unit. The 1903-opened plant was permanently  closed in 2012. 

THE TURBINE

To W.S.M.

Look at her—there she sits upon her throne
As ladylike and quiet as a nun!
But if you cross her—whew! her thunderbolts
Will shake the earth ! She’s proud as any
queen,
The beauty—knows her royal business too,
To light the world, and does it night by night
When her gay lord, the sun, gives up his job.
I am her slave; I wake and watch and run
From dark till dawn beside her.…

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