An early poster advertising the magazine, c. 1912.

By 1912, when Harriet Monroe founded Poetry, the texture of daily and cultural life already felt recognizably modern: new building materials and methods produced the first skyscrapers, five million Americans went to the movies every day, and the boundaries of acceptability in art and music were being redrawn by the likes of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Picasso, and Matisse. Monroe's response to these changes was not uniformly positive—when she saw Marcel Duchamp's 1912 painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase," at the New York Armory Show, she compared it to "a pack of brown cards in a nightmare or a dynamited suit of Japanese armor"—but she embraced the gesture of the dissident artists: "They throw a bomb into the entrenched camps, give to American art a much-needed shaking up." Painters and sculptors had answered the new century's challenge, discovering new forms of beauty and a fresh vocabulary. But American poetry remained stuck in the twilight of the nineteenth century and an exhausted Romanticism inherited from England:

As some dusk mother shields from all alarms
The tired child she gathers to her breast,
The brunette Night doth fold me in her arms,
And hushes me to perfect peace and rest.

These lines, from Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem "Night," are typical of the verse then sought after by American magazines and newspapers. When Poetry's first issue appeared in October 1912, the fifty-one-year-old Monroe could not have foreseen the magazine's impact. But it was exactly as if a bomb had exploded, and nothing would ever look, or sound, the same in American poetry again.

Harriet Monroe dressed in clothing she had purchased on a recent trip to China, c. 1910.

As Monroe looked around Chicago's cultural landscape in the early years of the twentieth century, she would have seen a world-class symphony and opera, theater troupes, dance companies, along with more substantial brick and mortar evidence of citywide support for the arts, including the Art Institute and the spectacular new Orchestra Hall. She resolved to do something similar for poetry by providing a venue devoted solely to its practice, as well as the rare chance for poets to be paid for their work.

Although Monroe herself was not wealthy, she moved comfortably in the circles of Chicago's commercial and cultural elite. One of her first approaches was to novelist, socialite, and institutional trustee Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor, who suggested a financial plan: convince 100 people to donate fifty dollars a year for five years to underwrite the operations of the magazine. With expenses covered by these donations, subscription income could be used to pay poets. Monroe had enlisted 108 people when she stopped fundraising in June 1912.

Monroe then spent several weeks in the Chicago Public Library, compiling lists of potential subscribers and contributors to whom she would send circulars announcing the new magazine: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (the puzzlingly redundant subtitle would be dropped by Karl Shapiro in 1950). The poets' circular assured them "of a chance to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by a popular magazine." As an early statement of her editorial principles, Monroe wrote, "We shall read with special interest poems of modern significance, but the most classic subject will not be declined if it reaches a high standard of quality."

Among the first to respond enthusiastically was Ezra Pound. He wrote to Monroe from London, predicting a renaissance in American poetry. Monroe accepted for her inaugural issue the two poems Pound submitted, "Middle-Aged" and "To Whistler, American" (in which he called Americans "that mass of dolts"), and also accepted Pound's offer to keep an eye out for material, naming him Poetry's first foreign correspondent.

Together, Pound and Monroe were largely responsible for introducing Modernist poetry to American readers. The revolution was rapid and complete. By 1915, when Pound forwarded "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by a twenty-six-year-old unpublished poet named T.S. Eliot, night was no longer (and could probably never be again) Wilcox's brunette Mother sheltering her children; instead it "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table." And in 1918 Alice Corbin Henderson, Monroe's astute assistant editor, wrote, "Nowadays everyone is writing imagist vers libre, or what the writers conceive as such.... Free verse is now accepted in good society, where rhymed verse is considered a little shabby and old-fashioned."


Since its inception the magazine has followed the Open Door policy articulated by Monroe in the second issue. As a result of its ecumenical approach, Poetry published a variety of work, from Joyce Kilmer's poem, "Trees" (the most enduringly beloved poem the magazine has ever printed), and the work of Midwestern populists such as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay, to important early works by Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. The editorial staff's responsiveness to the variety (and volume) of work it received no doubt helped to ensure the magazine's survival and longevity. By making quality the only criterion, rather than style or politics, Poetry avoided the dangers of a too-narrow adherence to any one agenda or fashion.

Dating from the days when Monroe would boil coffee over a fire in a vacant lot next door to the offices, the Open Door policy was also interpreted more literally. Monroe offered hospitality to many poets when they traveled through Chicago, such as W.B. Yeats (for whom she also arranged a visit to a local spiritualist) and also helped many poets financially, both directly and indirectly. In fact, more than a few future contributors and editors—Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters, Hugh Kenner, Hayden Carruth, George Dillon, and Henry Rago among them—would make their way to Poetry's offices in their youth, finding the door always open.




As early as the third issue, Poetry had achieved its distinctive mode, including six translations of the Bengali poet and Nobel prize-winner, Rabindranath Tagore, a selection of work by well-known and new poets from both sides of the Atlantic, including Yeats, John Reed, and Alice Meynell, as well as prose commentary. The eclectic mix was occasionally broken up by a single-topic special number, such as the "War" issue of November 1914. While Monroe took seriously Emerson's dictum about the need for America to create its own literature without slavish dependence upon its English cousins, she often published work in translation. Later issues might favor prose over poetry, or the work of the established over the work of the unknown. But the earliest issues contain the seeds that editors after Monroe would develop.

Sgt. George Dillon (editor of Poetry), Paris, 1944, after he broadcast news of the Liberation from the Eiffel Tower.

Following Monroe's death from a stroke in 1936 while on her way to climb Peru's Macchu Picchu, the magazine was edited by her assistant editor, Morton Dauwen Zabel, until George Dillon took over in 1937. He was helped by Peter De Vries, who later joined the staff at the New Yorker. They published many of the best young poets from the war years, often for the first time, including Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery (under a pseudonym furnished by a classmate who had stolen the poems), Frank O'Hara, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, and Karl Shapiro. Dillon served in World War II as did many of the poets he published; the tradition of special issues was continued with the August 1943 issue designated as the "Poets in Service Issue." The forties also saw the magazine printing a great deal of prose as the practice of New Criticism, with its emphasis on ambiguity and close reading, began to dominate English departments in universities. Although much of this criticism was useful, its growing presence in the magazine was also controversial, as the essays were often dense, difficult to read, and suited more to academic specialists than general readers.

When Dillon resigned in 1949, he suggested that his assistant editor, Hayden Carruth, replace him. Carruth wanted to print more and longer works by established poets, reducing the number of new voices that appeared. He also continued to tilt the balance of the magazine toward prose, at one point going so far as to include only eight pages of poetry in an issue. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Carruth lasted only a year in the job.

Karl Shapiro, packing up for the move from 1020 N. Lake Shore Drive to the Newberry Library.

When Karl Shapiro was named editor in 1950, he was thirty-seven years old and already a celebrity—a war veteran, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his volume of war poems, and a former Consultant to the Library of Congress (forerunner to today's poet laureate position). One of Shapiro's first editorial decisions was to eliminate the motto from Walt Whitman that had appeared on every issue: "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." Perhaps he wanted to update Poetry's image, which had become a little lackluster, or perhaps he was responding to this comment made by Eliot in a letter: "Poetry remains obstinately the same in appearance as in the days when it printed 'Prufrock.' (I have sometimes hoped to see a different quotation, whether from Whitman or somebody else, on the back of it; but even this conservatism is expressive of tenacity.)"

Shapiro's interest in translation ensured that several interesting special issues came out—on Greek and post-war French poetry, for example—as well as long sections devoted to poets such as Juan Ramon Jiménez several years before he received the Nobel Prize. Like editors before and after him, though, Shapiro finally tired of the many demands upon his attention and left after five years.

Shapiro's replacement, Henry Rago, met Monroe at age fourteen and published his first poem in Poetry at sixteen. A lawyer by training and meticulous about details, he was also an energetic fundraiser and interpreted the Open Door policy perhaps more liberally than his immediate predecessors, encouraging young poets—even while gently rejecting their work. He was even more eclectic in his tastes than Monroe, publishing work from many different schools, including Confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, formalists such as Richard Wilbur and James Merrill, and "Objectivists" such as Louis Zukofsky. Rago's fourteen-year tenure (1955-1969) coincided with a second flowering of American poetry and poets, most of whom Rago published extensively, including Robert Duncan, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Carolyn Kizer, James Wright, and James Schuyler.

Daryl Hine, editor of Poetry, c. 1968.

Daryl Hine (1969-1977) was Rago's replacement. His tenure saw remarkable formalist poetry brought to the forefront, as well as Poetry's first political stance, an anti-Vietnam War issue (September 1970). The appointment of John Frederick Nims in 1978 found greater numbers of newer, younger voices being published, and Nims had the reputation of laboring over many of his rejection notes, providing comments and guidance.

Joseph Parisi (1984-2002) and the current editor, Christian Wiman, have carried on the traditions of showcasing established poets alongside new voices (usually one-quarter to one-third of each issue is devoted to first appearances), and presenting to American readers significant selections of poetry in translation, in addition to reviews and essays. Yet at a time when more and more people are writing poetry (Poetry now receives over ninety thousand submissions a year), concerns about what is perceived as a declining audience for poetry have also grown. Except for the loftiness of tone, however, a comment published in the magazine's first issue sounds as relevant today as it did nearly a century ago:

. . . Anglo-Saxons are always forgetting that poetry is one of the great arts of expression. Many of our customs conspire to cause, almost to force, this forgetting. Thousands of us have been educated to a dark and often permanent ignorance of classic poetry . . . one early acquires a wary distrust of it as something one must constantly labor over. Aside from gaining in childhood this strong, practical objection to famous poetry . . . .

Despite the enduring nature of these worries about poetry's future, recent editors have added to their many responsibilities the need to develop poetry's readership by creating programs for libraries, organizing community events, and commissioning broadcasts and tape-recordings by poets. As Poetry's activities have expanded, so have its financial requirements, and Parisi's tenure as editor coincided with the single largest change at the magazine since its founding.


By 1930 all of Poetry's early competitors, such as the Little Review and the Egoist, were no longer operating. Although the magazine's Open Door policy helped guarantee its aesthetic survival, as the Depression in America deepened, Poetry was in a nearly constant state of financial emergency, and Monroe may have felt that she ended her initial fundraising in 1912 prematurely. She informed readers in a 1930 editorial that the current issue might be the last. The magazine was saved, however, by the many small donations from readers, and by a timely corporate grant.

Harriet Monroe shoeing Pegasus: cartoon from the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 30 January 1921.

Two years later, the magazine's twentieth anniversary provided the occasion for more worry. For the anniversary issue, Marianne Moore wrote the poem, "No Swan So Fine," which addresses the theme of passing. And, in a letter to Monroe, Moore wrote, "The thought of your terminating this great work of yours, begun twenty years ago, that has had throughout your particular individuality, saddens me. The article in the Tribune is gratifying, especially the line saying Poetry 'gives the city a loftier fame throughout the world than any other asset Chicago possesses.' . . . How I do hope that the millionaire will yet come forward." Monroe herself thought that the magazine would not survive her death. When she died in Peru in 1936 newspaper headlines agonized over the possibility that the magazine might close; once again the generosity of readers and contributors helped Poetry to continue. In 1941 the Modern Poetry Association was formed as a not-for-profit organization whose board members undertook financial responsibility for the magazine. Finances would always remain precarious, however, and the pattern of near collapse followed by last minute rescue was repeated in coming decades.

Nevertheless, throughout the waxing and waning of the magazine's fortunes, (during one particularly dark period under Karl Shapiro's editorship there was only one hundred dollars in the bank), Poetry continued to pay its contributors and award prizes, a tradition inaugurated by the Guarantor's Prize, given to Yeats in 1913. But editors, often practicing poets themselves, nearly always have had to juggle their editorial responsibilities with the need to solicit money from individuals and foundations, a task accomplished with varying degrees of vision, skill, and success. The first Poetry Day, arranged by Henry Rago in 1955, featured Robert Frost, and this fundraiser would become a popular annual event, interrupted only in 2001 by the events of September 11.

John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, at the first annual Pegasus Awards, 6 October 2004.

The pharmaceutical heiress, Ruth Lilly, endowed Poetry's Ruth Lilly Prize in 1986, a $100,000 award given annually to recognize a poet's lifetime achievement. Her generosity also provided two Lilly Fellowships given annually to promising undergraduate or graduate students of poetry. Lilly's relationship with the magazine began when she submitted some of her poems in 1972, receiving handwritten rejection notes from the editors. Impressed, perhaps, by this evidence of concern for fledgling writers and pleased, as well, by the magazine's responsible use of her previous contributions, in 2002 Ruth Lilly made Poetry a bequest worth more than one hundred million dollars, ensuring the magazine's existence in perpetuity. Since then, the Modern Poetry Association, Poetry's advisory board, has reorganized itself as the Poetry Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to crafting and implementing a new vision for poetry in contemporary American culture.

Poetry's financial situation may have changed, but its mission—to print the best work written by either new or established poets—remains the same. Also unchanged is the magazine's relationship to its authors and the editors' personal encouragement of aspiring poets. Although, as T.S. Eliot noted fifty years ago, "Poetry, in fact, is not a little magazine, but an INSTITUTION," its commitment to the presentation and development of poetry remains personal—one poem, one poet, one letter at a time.

—Averill Curdy