Poetry: A Magazine of Verse

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded in 1912 by Chicago poet Harriet Monroe. Taking Whitman's line, "To have great poets there must be great audiences too" as her motto, Monroe sought to cultivate a wide readership for new writing and ideas. By insisting on paying all contributors and establishing an annual prize, Poetry magazine raised the visibility and status of poetry. The journal published and promoted the careers of a galaxy of poets who came to define twentieth century modernism, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, among many others. Poetry transformed the way that poetry and poets are recognized and read worldwide, and it continues to flourish as a major cultural influence.

Monroe funded the early publication of Poetry with subscriptions and contributions from wealthy Chicago patrons. As editor, she shepherded the magazine through into its third decade. Following Monroe’s death in 1936, editorship passed to Morton Dauwen Zabel (1936-1937), followed by George Dillon (1937-1949), Hayden Carruth (acting editor, 1949), Karl Shapiro (1950-1954) and Henry Rago (1955-1969).

In 1931, Harriet Monroe presented her poetry library, her personal papers, and the editorial files of Poetry magazine to the University of Chicago. Following her death, the Monroe library and Poetry archives were received as a bequest and installed in a specially designated room in Wieboldt Hall, the modern languages building on the campus of the University of Chicago. The Modern Poetry Library room provided book shelves for the poetry collection, display cases for the letters and manuscripts of notable poets in the Poetry archives, and equipment for listening to recordings of poets reading their works.

The formal opening of the Harriet Monroe Library of Modern Poetry was marked by a festive dinner of the University of Chicago Friends of the Library on May 24, 1938. Guest speakers paying tribute to Harriet Monroe's achievements included Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish, Ford Maddox Ford, George Dillon, and Sterling North. Messages lauding Monroe's remarkable influence were received from many of the poets she had encouraged and promoted, including Ezra Pound, Walter De La Mare, William Rose Benet, Witter Bynner, John Gould Fletcher, Edgar Lee Masters, Lew Sarett, Jean Starr Untermeyer, and John Hall Wheelock, among others.

In addition to the gift of her library and archives, Harriet Monroe's will provided $5,000 to establish a fund for the advancement and encouragement of poetry through the award of a $500 prize for distinction in poetry. Monroe stipulated that the committee of award for the prize should give preference to "poets of progressive rather than academic tendencies." The inaugural Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, given at the University of Chicago in June 1941, was presented to twenty-eight-year-old Muriel Rukeyser. Among those receiving the award in later years were Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell.

In 1953, the Harriet Monroe Modern Poetry Library was incorporated within the newly established Department of Special Collections of the University of Chicago Library. In 2002, this department became the Special Collections Research Center. The Modern Poetry book collection, enlarged continuously on an annual basis with the support of an endowed acquisition fund, is divided between a poetry collection in the general stacks of Regenstein Library and the Modern Poetry rare books and serials in the Special Collections Research Center. The editorial archives of Poetry magazine, the personal papers of Harriet Monroe, and the papers of other modern poets, editors and publishers of poetry are held as part of the manuscript collections in the Special Collections Research Center.

The editorial archives of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse acquired by bequest from Harriet Monroe included extensive files of correspondence and poetry manuscripts from the time of her founding of the journal in 1912 until her death in 1936. Subsequently, the University of Chicago Library acquired two additional series of editorial files documenting Poetry and its authors during the years 1936-1953 and 1954-1961. Together, these three series of files preserve the letters and writings of a significant and remarkably diverse group of modern poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Eliot, Pound, Williams, Moore, Yeats, Sandburg, Thomas, and Frost are represented, along with Vachel Lindsay, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, Yvor Winters, Sara Teasdale, James Joyce, Edgar Lee Masters, Alfred Kreymborg, Ford Maddox Ford, Louis Zukofsky, Hart Crane, Witter Bynner, and Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and many others.