Poetry Review

the magazine of the Poetry Society, founded by W. G. Kyle in 1909, when the Poetical Gazette was introduced to disseminate information about readings and other events. In 1911 Harold Monro was approached by the Society, who wished him to edit the Gazette; Monro was out of sympathy with the marked conservatism of the senior members, who included Sir Henry Newbolt and Herbert Trench, and proposed forming Poetry Review as an independent journal incorporating the Gazette. The first issue appeared in January 1912. Due to disharmony between himself and the Society, Monro's editorship lasted only a year; he gave the magazine a refreshingly eclectic character, favouring verse by the leading Georgian poets but admitting work by more innovative writers at the suggestion of F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound, who supported the venture. Stephen Phillips was the editor from 1913 to 1915; his preferences for verse-dramas and late Victorian poetry determined Poetry Review's reactionary tone. Between 1916 and 1947 W. G. Kyle assumed editorship, appointing Alice Hunt Bartlett as American associate editor in 1923; poems and articles by American writers were regularly featured throughout the 1920s and 1930s and sales increased through Kyle's skill in attracting a popular readership. The quality of the work published tended, however, to be unexceptional. Muriel Spark's editorship from 1947 to 1949 enlivened the magazine. Since then it has developed into an essential forum for contemporary poetry in Britain, featuring verse and criticism by the leading writers of successive decades while remaining hospitable to work by newer writers.