Harriet Monroe was born on December 23, 1860. Though she didn’t become famous until her later years in life, her childhood had an impact on where she would end up in the world. Her father was a lawyer and Harriet spent much of her time trying to fill her loneliness. Her father had a library, where Harriet began the journey of a poet. In her autobiography, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World, Harriet writes, "I started in early with Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and Thackeray; and always the book-lined library gave me a friendly assurance of companionship with lively and interesting people, gave me friends of the spirit to ease my loneliness."
Monroe spent many years treading the waters of the poet, but most years in the ocean of minor poets. She faced the obstacles that countless other poets faced, mainly the limitations of unmet expectations of others. She had dreams of setting the fresh work of new poets loose in the wildlife of literature. She would not be boxed in my cookie cutter requirements and financial barricades. And she would soon release that freedom to the rest of the world.
Finally in 1912, Harriet Monroe started the shaping of the poetry renaissance; she founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, known as Poetry Magazine. This became a catalyst for Monroe’s fame and success. She was in the big leagues, and she became the door on which other poets’ opportunity would knock. This media let the new wave of poets expose themselves and their work to the world and watch is spread like a virus as the magazine, and the poets, grew in popularity.
She called this opportunity the “voice” of the poets. In the first issue of Poetry, Monroe makes these statements in her introductory essay The Motive of the Magazine:
“Poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and glamour.
“Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process as unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. The people must do their part if the poet is to tell the story to the future; they must cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as the rose.”
She believed that the magazine would work as a voice for new poets; she explained how it’s a relationship (which involves two things being related) so there is responsibility on both ends of the relationship.
By the second issue, Monroe announced her policy, which was derived from her personal experience, hardships, and vision: "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 . . . 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."
Harriet Monroe continued to be a part of Poetry Magazine until her death in 1936, at the age of seventy-six. In those twenty-four years, famous poets including T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moor, Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens had their work featured in the magazine.
Looking back, the poetry magazine successfully fulfilled Monroe's starting purpose to "give to poetry her own place, her own voice."
I
THE lady in front of me in the car,
With little red coils close over her ears,
Is talking with her friend;
And the circle of ostrich foam around her hat,
Curving over like a wave,
Trembles with her little windy words.
What she is saying, I wonder,
That her feathers should tremble
And the soft fur of her coat should slip down over her shoulders?
Has her string of pearls been stolen,
Or maybe her husband?
II
He is drunk, that man —
Drunk as a lord, a lord of the bibulous past.
He shouts wittily from his end of the car to the man in the corner;
He bows to me with chivalrous apologies.
He philosophizes, plays with the wisdom of the ages,
Flings off his rags,
Displays his naked soul —
Athletic, beautiful, grotesque.
In the good time coming,
When men drink no more,
Shall we ever see a nude soul dancing
Stript and free
In the temple of his god?
III
She comes smiling into the car
With irridescent bubbles of children.
She blooms in the close plush seats
Like a narcissus in a bowl of stones.
She croons to a baby in her lap —
The trees come swinging by to listen,
And the electric lights in the ceiling are stars.
References
The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2.
