Monroe, Harriet, 1860-1936

Poet and founding editor of Poetry: a Magazine of Verse.

American editor, critic, and poet.

Harriet Monroe was born in Chicago in 1860, and she remained identified all her life with the city. After gaining some local recognition as a poet, a newspaper critic and a lecturer on poetry, Monroe's literary reputation was based on her conception of a magazine wholly devoted to poetry. In 1912, the first number of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse appeared, and Monroe spent the rest of her life as the magazine's editor and champion of both established and new poets. Harriet Monroe died in 1936.

Chicago poet, literary critic, and editor Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), founded the journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse . In her role as editor and publisher, she fostered the development of modernist poetry by such poets as T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg. In 1913, she introduced Imagism, modernist poetry by H.D. and others who were influenced by Chinese and Japanese verse.

Edna Davis Romig was born on January 16, 1889. She was a professor of English for 36 years, most of them spent at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She published several volumes of poetry and a book on Walt Whitman. Some of Romig's work, including short fictional pieces, travel reminscences, and a biography of her friends Robert and Elinor Frost, remained incomplete or unpublished. She retired from teaching in 1961 and moved to Estes Park, Colorado.

Harriett Monroe (23 Dec. 1860-26 Sept. 1936), poet and editor, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Henry Stanton Monroe, a lawyer, and Martha Mitchell. Her parents, both of Scotch ancestry and moderately wealthy, came to the pioneer community of Chicago in the early 1850s. After 1871 Henry Monroe's law practice began earning less.

Harriet Monroe's education began in her father's library where she spent hours reading Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Thackeray. After suffering a severe unidentified illness in 1876, she was sent the next year to Visitation Convent in Georgetown, D.C. to benefit from the milder climate. At Visitation, her health improved, and away from her quarrelling parents and assertive older sisters she became more independent. Monroe's intellectual and literary aspirations were encouraged by the faculty, especially by Sister Pauline, her instructor in English literature and composition.

After graduating from Visitation in 1879, Monroe returned to the family home in Chicago, where she would remain until her father's death in 1903. During the next ten years she participated in the social and intellectual life of the rapidly growing city. Declining family funds motivated her to search for work and she began a twenty year career in journalism, writing freelance reviews of art, music, and drama for Chicago and New York papers. It was during this time that her social circle expanded and included authors such as Margaret Sullivan, Eugene Field, and her long time correspondent Robert Louis Stevenson. Additionally, Monroe's sister Dora, married John Wellborn Root, the architect who would make his mark through the rebuilding of Chicago after the 1871 fire. Following Root's death in 1891 Monroe wrote a memoir of his career.

Throughout the 1880s trips to New York with her sister Lucy continued to widen her social and professional circle, and Monroe became a regular attendant at the literary salons of important figures such as Edmund C. Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder. In 1888 her first published poem, "With a Copy of Shelley," appeared in Century Magazine.

That same year, while working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune, she was commissioned by the city fathers to write an ode of dedication for the new Chicago Auditorium designed by Louis Sullivan. Another commission followed in March 1891 for the Chicago's World's Columbian Exhibition. After two years of struggling over the piece it was read at the fair on the opening day, 21 October 1892, and was well received. The Ode was printed in the New York World without Monroe's permission. She sued and after four years of legal actions she was awarded a judgment of $5000.00. Monroe used the money for another trip to Europe. Once returned she continued writing and teaching in an effort to earn a small income. In 1899, her health suffered and she went to the American west in search of milder climate. There she discovered the western deserts and mountains that became her passion.

From 1895 to 1910 Monroe's life was occupied with travel, continuing her career as a freelance journalist, teaching, and writing. In 1910 she traveled through Europe and Russian on her way to visit her sister Lucy in China. Lucy had established herself as an editor at the avant-guard publisher Stone and Kimball, and then married William J. Calhoune, the US minister to China.

Efforts to become a major literary presence were continually frustrated, and finances continued to be strained, but early in 1911 at age fifty, Monroe began fundraising for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse devoted exclusively to the publication of poetry and the advancement of promising young poets. Monroe asserted that "poetry cannot sing into a void" and began her project in the hopes of reenergizing the somewhat stagnant state of American poetry. The funding for the magazines first five years came from Chicago's elite. The first issue debuted in October 1912. The young Chicago writer, Alice Corbin Henderson was the magazine's first associate editor, and the poet Ezra Pound served as its foreign correspondent in London, thus assuring connections between the American and English poetry circles. Poetry gained immediate national attention in the popular press, and the magazine soon became an important forum for critical discussion and a showplace for promising poets. Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Vachael Lindsay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, T.S. Elliott, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce would all be published in Poetry.

The final twenty-four years of Monroe's life were occupied primarily with Poetry; she was the main force that ensured the magazine's success in times of financial insecurity. Monroe continued traveling and journeyed to Europe, Mexico, China and South America. In August 1936 Monroe, then seventy-six, attended a conference of the International Association of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While visiting Incan ruins in the Peruvian highlands, Monroe suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in the cemetery, Pantheon of Arequipa, at the foot of Mt. Misti. Poetry was carried on through the efforts of editor and literary critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel

In Poetry, Monroe created an exciting new forum in which modern poetry could flourish. As a skilled yet eclectic editor, she was instrumental in unearthing and encouraging promising new poets.