“Harriet Monroe, Poet, Friend of Poets!”

Published as part of the exhibition Harriet Monroe & the Open Door

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Poetry’s Legacy and Editors

When Harriet Monroe titled her memoir A Poet’s Life, she signaled that of her many roles—poet, art critic, editor, publisher—the one most important to her was poet. However, her legacy is her groundbreaking work as founder and editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, arguably the most significant literary journal of the 20th century, and rightly so. Her vision for a magazine devoted solely to poetry and poetry criticism that paid poets for their work capitalized and built on a growing interest in a new kind of poetry—sleeker, sharper, and less focused on rhyme scheme than on images and expression. In fact, Monroe rushed the first issue of Poetry to print a month earlier than planned in order to claim the name and beat out a rival Boston-based, all-poetry magazine on its way to newsstands. That magazine, William Stanley Braithwaite’s Poetry Journal, lasted only a couple of years compared to Monroe’s Poetry, still going strong at 110.

Monroe staffed Poetry almost entirely with poets, many of whom were women. Her first associate editor and closest advisor was Alice Corbin Henderson, whose rigorous standards and enthusiasm for avant-garde experimentation shaped the magazine as hospitable to Modernist poets. Henderson discovered many of Poetry’s most famous contributors, including Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg. Although she left Chicago in 1916 to recuperate from tuberculosis in New Mexico, Henderson continued editing for Poetry from afar and coedited three editions of The New Poetry: An Anthology with Monroe. 

Poet, novelist, memoirist, and war reporter Eunice Tietjens was the next assistant editor, stepping in to help with the day-to-day operations of the magazine when Henderson moved to New Mexico. Other women who served as Poetry editors included Helen Hoyt, Jessica Nelson North, and Marion Strobel. These women often mediated between Monroe and the poets. Henderson routinely served as the editorial heavy, turning away would-be poets whose work was not up to Poetry’s standards, while Tietjens intervened in the other direction, offering kindness when the austere Monroe came on too severely, delivering “caustic criticism so devastating that visibly the edges of [their souls] seared and curled, like the edges of an egg frying in a too hot pan.”

Personal Taste or an Open Door?

After publishing only four issues of Poetry, Monroe received a complaint from the poet Conrad Aiken: “the Editor, or at least the Editor and Mr. Pound, are using Poetry too egotistically, in order to give expression and scope to their own personalities,” wrote the disgruntled future poet laureate of the United States. Alluding to the famed Imagist expatriate poet Ezra Pound as Monroe’s editorial Svengali, Aiken argued that individual taste had no place in the making of Poetry. Against editorial egotism, Aiken advocated for a “broad and sympathetic tolerance of all poetry, in a maternal attitude, without favoritism encouraging each of her children to develop as instinct suggests.” 

Anticipating critiques of this sort, Monroe’s stated mission as editor of Poetry was precisely to maintain an open door policy toward diverse forms of the art, as advertised two issues earlier:

The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. 

Perhaps Aiken felt he was holding Monroe to her word, or maybe he was specifically targeting Pound, whose promotion of other writers led to Aiken’s sense of abandonment and surly attitude. Regardless of his motive, Aiken’s letter and its misogynistic rhetoric illuminates the complexities and challenges Monroe faced as a woman at the head of Poetry at that time in literary history. Aiken not only subscribed to the patronizing notion that one ought to show “tolerance” toward diverse forms of poetry but also chauvinistically gendered inclusiveness as “a maternal attitude” rather than a universal principle.

The questions Aiken’s letter and Monroe’s “Open Door” manifesto raised continue to shape debates around contemporary poetry. Is personal taste the best guide to poetry, or is it a cover for intolerance? Should Poetry spotlight poets of “ample genius,” or should it seek to include “all poetry . . . without favoritism”? Might a “maternal attitude” to the work of editing Poetry avoid the pitfalls of paternalistic gatekeeping? Every issue of Poetry must somehow address, if not answer, these questions, from Monroe’s time to today.

Getting Poetry Off the Ground

Growing up in Chicago in the late 19th century after the Chicago fire of 1871, Monroe witnessed a unique experiment in civic art as the city reimagined itself as a functional, beautiful metropolis from the ground up. Art was generally seen as a public good. Monroe, the daughter of a lawyer, came from a respected, if not wealthy, Chicago family and moved comfortably and confidently among those whose wealth built the city’s famed boulevards, parks, and most important civic institutions. 

When Monroe returned from her year-long trip around the world in 1911 determined to realize her decades-old dream of bringing the same civic attention to poetry, what she called “the Cinderella of the arts,” she appealed to these same industrialists and merchants for financial support. Her initial fundraising goal of 5,000 dollars a year for five years was, in her words, “an audacious advance vote of confidence.” By canvasing on foot in Chicago’s Loop business district and making personal visits, she persuaded 100 initial donors to lend five years of support of at least 50 dollars a year. The money, a huge feat, would keep the magazine solvent and fund a series of monetary prizes for poets, similar to those awarded to sculptors, painters, and architects, to give poets the time and financial support necessary to grow in their art. Poetry’s would-be rival, the Poetry Journal, failed to capture the public’s imagination in the same way Poetry did and also lacked Monroe’s aggressive funding model.

At the same time she was securing funds to publish Poetry, Monroe reached out to American and British poets for exceptional work to fill the magazine. She sent introductory letters and prospectuses to poets she considered the most likely to share her vision of a magazine challenging the conservatism of American literary magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. She promised that “while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete human expression of truth and beauty.” 

What’s more, having already secured a five-year endowment for the magazine before she even began soliciting poems, Monroe was able to promise payment for poets’ work. She had no difficulty finding interested poets, and within a few years, Poetry had galvanized an American “poetry renaissance,” popularizing an A-list of modern American poets, including H.D., T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, and Sara Teasdale. Monroe also familiarized American readers with work by international poets such as Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, Yone Noguchi, and William Butler Yeats. 

“Stolen for Museum!” Harriet Monroe’s Personal Papers

Submissions that never made it into the pages of Poetry weren’t always relegated to the dustbin of literary history. From the early days of the magazine, Monroe had the foresight to save some memorable correspondence from aspiring contributors in a file referred to as her “Museum.” These artifacts ranged from humorous parody poems by her friends to touching letters from various aspiring writers and poems in praise of Monroe herself:

Please accept this sonnet which I have written in honor of you. Perhaps you will think my poem a little too uplifting, but it is not. The tribute is mild, to say the least. I hope you will not hesitate to publish it in your magazine. When my poem is printed, please send me a copy in which it appears . . .

Hoping you will accept it, I am,

Yours Respectfully, Sam Heller

Monroe declined to publish the accompanying sonnet by Sam Heller, but she did keep it. She may have found lines such as “Yours will be the pomp of royal weight, / And all the Earth will to you glory bring” rather too uplifting in the end. This and other items from her private Museum serve as a reminder of Monroe’s editorial tact and diplomacy; rather than simply rejecting Heller’s poem without explanation or comment, this busy literary entrepreneur took the time to reply that his sonnet in her honor did her “too much” honor, just as she replied—with compassion or sternness as the situation warranted—to so many writers.

P.S. I do not look for a reply. Merely wrote to try and show you that even inmates of such a place as this, have at least some of the finer feelings and to thank you for your expressions of sorrow and sympathy.

This postscript from J.K. Brady’s 1914 letter to Monroe testifies to her care for relationships beyond Poetry’s pages. Brady’s poem “Usurpation, Realizations & Revulsion” never appeared in Poetry, but Monroe’s editorial correspondence nonetheless felt like an open door to this incarcerated writer. “If I were a free man, perhaps I would not think it essential to reply to your card,” Brady wrote. “You, however, knowing that I am a prisoner still think me and my feelings worthy of some consideration and so merit an expression of my thanks.”

Poetry’s editorial archive illuminates how Monroe kept a door open to many different spaces: the magazine’s office in her Cass and Erie Street residences, archival sites such as her editorial Museum, and, for writers like Brady, “inmates of such a place as this.” Even if his poem wouldn’t be published in Poetry, Brady knew that his work had been read with “some consideration” by Harriet Monroe and that she took him seriously enough to write back personally.

Monroe’s “Museum” shows how curation offered her a way of thinking about editorial work and the Poetry archive. (The English word curation is derived from curare meaning to care for). Some poems submitted to Poetry might go on to reach a wide readership through publication in the magazine; other tidbits, such as the tongue-twister “Poor Old Bill Bruce,” might be archived for unknown audiences to come, such as visitors to this exhibit today. Even if there is some irony to the preservation of Heller’s sonnet in this private Museum, curation furnished Monroe with a metaphor not only for editing a publication but also for managing relationships with donors, fellow editors, journalists, and poets like Heller, who all contributed to the making of Poetry beyond its pages.

Life at Poetry wasn’t all work and no play. This page from the editorial office’s guest book heralds the return of Eunice Tietjens, Monroe’s associate editor, from her travels abroad—“The wanderer returns!”—along with the celebrated poet of Chicago, Carl Sandburg, and the novelist Robert Herrick, who shared a name with the 17th-century Cavalier poet, visiting from the University of Chicago. Monroe’s guest book chronicles a fascinating parade of poets, intellectuals, and well-wishers who passed through the open door of her home office on Erie Street.

“A Name Both Good and Great!” Harriet, With Affection

Monroe was a firm believer in Chicago's centrality to American artistic culture. She imagined that in working for the development of public appreciation of poetry as a fine art, Poetry would rank alongside other important endowed Chicago institutions such as the Art Institute, the Chicago Grand Opera Company, the Symphony Orchestra, and the Chicago Theatre Company. In fact, when she asked Chicago’s prominent business people for funding, she predicted that Poetry would be “the most important aesthetic advertisement Chicago has ever had.” Much as Chicago’s industrialists transformed the raw goods of America—lumber, livestock, crops—into usable products packaged and shipped around the country via the railroads, Monroe promised to gather, edit, curate, and disseminate poetry nationwide. Poetry might be the least appreciated of the arts, but as she explained in her fundraising prospectus, because it “travels more easily” so its influence can be “more far reaching.”

Monroe knew how to throw open the doors to a good party, too, as this souvenir menu for a Poet’s Dinner at the National Arts Club on January 28, 1913, attests. Featuring courses such as “Tartar Sauce Adventure” and “Testament of Fresh Mushrooms,” the evening’s repast wound down with “Nectar from Mt. Olympus” followed by “Cigarettes.” Guests included Sara Teasdale, who won the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (then named the Columbia Poetry Prize) in 1918; the inexhaustible author, editor, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer; the animal rights activist Royal Dixon, who cofounded the First Church for Animal Rights in Manhattan; the self-help writer Elizabeth Towne, author of Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus and How to Train Children and Parents; and celebrated poets such as Edwin Markham and Josephine Preston Peabody. 

A lofty occasion, if the buoyant clouds billowing across the menu offer any indication, the Poet’s Dinner appears to have been great fun; even the hungry Pegasus sticking out his tongue for (or at?) the laurels handed down to a decadently outfitted harpist—perhaps Monroe herself—seemed to enjoy himself immensely.

When Ezra Pound accepted Monroe’s invitation to join the editorial board of Poetry in August 1912, he asked her, “Are you for American poetry or for poetry? The latter is more important, but it is important that America should boost the former, provided it don’t mean a blindness to the art.” Both agreed that the new magazine needed to elevate American poets, but Pound had little faith in the American public’s ability to recognize and appreciate its own artists, railing infamously in his poem “To Whistler, American” in the first issue against “that mass of dolts.”

Monroe never doubted it. In choosing Whitman’s words for the masthead, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences too,” she conveyed her faith in American readers to respond to interesting and provocative poetry, just as the editors of Poetry trust readers today. “We believe there is a public for poetry, that it will grow” she wrote in her editorial note in the first issue, “and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance.”

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Title quote, “Harriet Monroe, Poet, Friend of Poets”: Source:, Monroe’s memorial stone, Arequipa, Peru.

Header quote, “A Name Both Good and Great”: Source, Samuel Heller,  unpublished sonnet to Harriet Monroe, 1916.