Poetry

‘a magazine of verse’, as its subtitle states, founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, the author of several collections of verse, who had organized a highly efficient programme of funding in 1911. Her advance publicity for the venture drew it to the attention of Ezra Pound in time for him to be listed as the magazine's foreign correspondent in its first issue. By 1913 Pound had established Poetry as the principal platform for Imagism, introducing work by Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and others; the sixth issue featured F. S. Flint's statement of Imagist poetics and Pound's ‘A Few Don'ts By An Imagist’. He also supplied poems by W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and F. M. Ford. Pound's international and experimental emphases were at odds with Monroe's more conservative sense of the magazine's essentially American identity; he had to exert considerable pressure in persuading her to print T. S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915. Although Pound remained associated with Poetry until 1919, his involvement diminished as his interest in the Little Review increased. In 1919 Monroe affirmed her patriotic intentions of dedicating the magazine to ‘the imaginative life of the nation’. Until the end of her editorship in 1935 Poetry was primarily concerned with the work of American poets; Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams were among those who dispelled the mediocrity which occasionally prevailed. Monroe's successors include Karl Shapiro, who edited Poetry from 1950 to 1955. It continues to appear, its contributors having included almost every American poet of note and many European, Israeli, and dissident Russian poets.