Happy Birthday to Harriet Monroe, founder of “Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.”

Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, was born in Chicago on December 23, 1860. She was determined to make her mark in the literary world, and founded Poetry in her native city–which she hoped to establish as an important literary center– in 1912. She wanted the journal to “open its pages to all sorts of experimental and unconventional work without neglecting the traditional forms.” It is still going strong today. Poetry inspired countless other “little magazines,” and published important early work by poets the likes of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and T.S. Eliot, to name only a few distinguished voices. Monroe edited the magazine from its founding until her death in 1936.

Poetry_cover1

Patrick Kerin

Sources:

Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by George Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Philip Leininger. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1991.

Wikipedia entry on Harriet Monroe.

1 Comment

  1. […] work that garnered attention. Harriet Monroe had established Poetry: A Magazine of Verse that year (https://buckeyemuse.wordpress.com/2014/12/23/happy-birthday-to-harriet-monroe-founder-of-poetry-a-ma…), and included among the early groundbreaking verse published in the journal was Sandburg’s […]