“Chicago Woman Who Changed the Face of Verse”

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

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The Columbian Ode

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was the most significant event in Harriet Monroe’s life. Monroe was 32 years old at the time, and after years of struggling as a writer, she finally had a moment of public recognition; with purpose, Monroe would construct a poem about the discovery of the Americas that became the work through which she herself was discovered as a poet. However, the arcane language and genteel style of The Columbian Ode did not secure its place in a canon of highly read poetry—after the fair, few people remembered it. But the story of the Ode’s publication became central to the country’s most important “defense of poetry.” Monroe’s steadfast commitment to her artistic ownership of the poem—as originator and copyright holder— profoundly shaped the future of American poetry and set her on the path to establish Poetry magazine. 

The “discovery” of the Americas was the Ode’s subject, and the rise of Chicago was its revelation. Monroe had determined to use no classical images in her poem; instead, she invoked the quasi-mythological figure of Columbia, a feminine personification of the Americas. Columbia embodied Monroe’s vision for a new world and a rejection of old Europe. In careful lines of rhymed verse, Columbia came to Chicago crowned not with Greek laurels but with native flowers of the American prairie.

Through the rhetoric of westward expansion, the Ode disregarded the presence of Native Americans. As Monroe later explained, without irony, Columbia moved through “vast virgin spaces toward the splendors and triumphs of modern civilization and an era of universal peace.” Her perspective is both a product of her times and, for today’s readers, painfully racist. But it is not the poem itself that people remember: it is the drama surrounding the Ode’s appearance in print.

“World’s Fair Girl Champion”

In 1891, Monroe convinced the civic-minded men in charge of the Chicago Fair, some of whom she knew through her family’s social networks, that she deserved a commission to write a poem for the Fair. They agreed to pay her 1,000 dollars but only after they approved the poem. Despite her competence and vision, Monroe struggled to complete The Columbian Ode during a long period of physical and emotional turmoil, what she called “two years of nervous prostration.”

Why was the Ode so difficult to write? It might have had something to do with the audience. When Monroe delivered the Ode to the all-male commission in March 1892, the members balked. The commission had submitted the poem “for expert advice” to William Morton Payne, conservative editor of The Dial, a literary magazine that only much later was taken over by the Modernists. Payne suggested that certain lines of the Ode were “wanting in euphony.” Whole stanzas “fell below the high standard of the main poem.” What hit Monroe hardest was the critique from businessman and art collector James W. Ellsworth, who told her she must remove the Ode’s fulsome tribute to John Wellborn Root, Monroe’s brother-in-law. Root had been a visionary architect who partnered with Daniel Burnham in planning the Fair but died after catching pneumonia during the cold winter of 1891. Root’s death was a loss for the city of Chicago and a personal tragedy for the Monroe family.

On September 24, 1892, Monroe wrote to her sisters Lucy Monroe and Dora Louise Root, railing against Ellsworth and his “persistent and malignant misrepresentation of the poem.” “[T]he little brute raised a point against the four lines about John,” Monroe complained. She explained that once the committee looked at the lines (most members had not even read the Ode), many agreed that the lines should stay. Monroe had prevailed. This contretemps steeled her for many more battles with powerful men to defend her choices as a woman of poetry.

The biggest battle unfolded over the next several months. “Our last campaign has been to prevent ‘scooping,’” Monroe told her sisters. “I have just seen a correspondent of the N.Y. World, and he says his paper printed the poem this morning in defiance of copyright.” Indeed, it was true: a major newspaper in New York City had decided to “take our chances” on publishing Monroe’s Ode without her consent nearly a month before it would debut at the commemoration ceremonies. They did not expect that Monroe would launch a major lawsuit in return.

Harriet Monroe vs. The Press Publishing Company

The World published selections of The Columbian Ode and depicted Monroe as a young, light-hearted, affluent poet who did not need to write for money. None of this was true. She was fiercely devoted to her career and craft. She scratched out a living from freelance writing because no newspaper would hire a woman on staff. Monroe lived with her family because it was respectable, and she could not afford to do otherwise. The only truth in The World’s account was that she felt strongly about the arrangement of her poem.

Ironically, the illegal publication in The World became the most important thing about the poem. With the help of her father, a Chicago lawyer, Monroe took The World to court for copyright infringement. She won. The U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, forcing The World to pay Monroe 5,000 dollars. This victory ensured that the language of poetry had both intellectual and monetary value and that publications such as The World could not poach poems for free. 

“So my little lawsuit, being without precedent, established its own precedence and became a textbook case, defining the rights of authors to control their unpublished works,” Monroe wrote later in her autobiography, A Poet’s Life. 

Dedication Day

The Fair’s dedication ceremonies took place October 21, 1892, many months before the Fair opened. Daniel Burnham’s neoclassical “white city” was still under construction in Jackson Park except for the completed Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, then the largest covered building in the world. At 44 acres, it tripled St. Peter’s in Rome and welcomed an audience of nearly 100,000 people.

Theodore Thomas, director of the newly formed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted parts of Monroe’s Ode that Boston composer G.W. Chadwick had set to music. A chorus of 5,000 sang at the south end of the enormous building. Stanzas of the poem were also recited by the famous New York elocutionist Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, who stood six feet tall and had a commanding appearance and demeanor. 

But the poem was difficult to hear. Sound unfurled through the vast building in waves. Hundreds of people gathered around a Mexican band dressed in scarlet and playing “Yankee Doodle” at the north end of the building; Monroe’s Ode, though praised by the Chicago Herald, could barely “pierce” the sound.

Souvenir Edition of the Ode

The Columbian Ode was published in special, red-bound souvenir editions designed by Chicago printer and artist Will H. Bradley and printed on hand-crafted paper. The Arts and Crafts style would have appeared modern at the time. Swirling leaves frame the stalwart figure of Columbia. Bold scarlet letters emphasize the title and Harriet Monroe’s name. 

Despite its beauty, very few souvenir editions sold. A slightly larger (and cheaper) pamphlet edition of The Columbian Ode was also printed and for sale at the Fair, but Monroe ended up with several thousand unsold copies. According to her autobiography, during the cold winter that followed the Fair, Monroe made use of the unsold editions as winter fuel in her little stove. 

Poetry’s Birth from Ashes

Monroe never attracted a substantial readership for her own poetry, but after the Fair, she still had the payout from her victorious lawsuit. With this hefty sum, worth roughly 170,000 dollars today, Monroe eventually set sail for a “grand tour” of Europe, an experience familiar to many of her social class, though only now did she have the resources to afford it. In a reversal of Columbia’s journey to the Americas, Monroe took the money from her Ode and, in 1897, boarded a steamer for old Europe.

There, in the gardens and cathedrals of England, Italy, and France, Monroe realized in a panic that modern poetry in her home country did not have the old models of European patronage that supported the arts. How would American poetry flourish without financial support? Ultimately, she landed on one of the most significant issues for her future endeavor, Poetry magazine. She would have to ensure that the wealthy industrialists of Chicago would believe in the fundamental value of poetry. A little like Columbia, Monroe would have to journey westward to forge a new future for herself and for poetry.

Title quote, “Chicago Woman Who Changed the Face of Verse”: Source, headline, CityTalk, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.58846, March 29-April 11, 2002 issue.

Header quote, “World’s Fair Girl Champion”: Source, Marion Strobel, “Harriet Monroe, God-Parent to All U.S. Poets,” published under “Chicagoans Who Are Doing Great Things,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, 1926.