Harriet Monroe

Poet, editor, scholar, critic, and patron of the arts Harriet Monroe founded the literary journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.  She became instrumental in the “poetry renaissance” of the early 20th century by managing a forum that gave poets and poetry a platform to reach a wider American audience. Through her “Open Door” policy, she established an editorial strategy independent of individual editorial preference or literary movements. According to Judith Paterson in a Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, Monroe’s commitment to this approach ensured the magazine’s success: “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 … desire to print the best English verse … being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.”

Monroe developed her love of literature as a child. Her father's library was the perfect haven for a reclusive child in a household fraught with parental tension and sibling rivalry. In her autobiography, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (Macmillan, 1938), published two years after her death, Monroe recalled “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 continued her education in the Victorian seminary curriculum at the Visitation Convent in Washington, D.C. Fueled by fears of posthumous anonymity, after graduation she proclaimed her determination to become “great and famous” as a poet or playwright. As Paterson quoted her, “I cannot remember when to die without leaving some memorable record did not seem to me a calamity too terrible to be borne.”

For the next 30 years, Monroe endured financial challenges in pursuit of art. She enjoyed a few notable breaks but had to cope with harsh realities. Though Century Magazine published her poem “With a Copy of Shelley” in 1889, she quickly became disillusioned with the limited earnings available for poets. Paterson again quoted Monroe’s comment  “The minor painter or sculptor was honored with large annual awards in our greatest cities, while the minor poet was a joke of the paragraphers, subject to the popular prejudice that his art thrived best on starvation in a garret.” Her frustration served as a springboard for change.

Solidifying her professional reputation as a freelance correspondent to the Chicago Tribune and developing a widening circle of prominent literary acquaintances, Monroe was commissioned to write a commemorative ode for the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. She worked on this Columbian Ode for two years. Sarah Cowell Le Moyne recited the poem at Dedication Day of the  Chicago’s World’s Fair and Columbian Exposition in front of 5,000 attendees. Composer George Whitefield Chadwick set the ode to music and a choir “of thousands” sang it, according to newspapers of the time. The poem was also sold in pamphlets during the fair’s wildly popular six-month run; however, Monroe ended up with several thousand unsold copies.

The Columbian Ode might not be well-remembered today, but its impact on American poetry was profound. It was at the center of an important lawsuit that set precedence for authorial control over publication via copyright. The World, a New York newspaper, published selections from the ode without Monroe’s consent nearly a month before the poem’s debut at Dedication Day. With help from her father, a Chicago lawyer, Monroe launched a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Monroe won the lawsuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling; the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and forced The World to pay Monroe $5,000, money she used to travel through Europe. In A Poet’s Life, Monroe wrote about the case, “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’s European travels during the 1890s helped shape her poetry and her business decisions. Another worldwide trip in 1910 convinced her of a definite need for a poetic publishing outlet. With help from publisher Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, Monroe persuaded 100 prominent Chicago business leaders to sponsor her new magazine by committing to $50 a year for a five-year subscription. The $5,000 was enough to launch Poetry magazine on September 23, 1912, and uphold its promise to contributors of adequate payment for all published work.

Monroe was editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for its first two years without salary while simultaneously working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune. According to Paterson, Monroe felt validated when a contributor, Rabindranath Tagore, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Monroe said, “I drew a long breath of renewed power and felt that my little magazine was fulfilling some of our seemingly extravagant hopes.” By 1914, the magazine work became too much for her to accomplish while working other jobs, so she resigned from the Chicago Tribune and accepted a salary of $50 per month from the magazine. For more than 10 years, she maintained her meager stipend, raising it to $100 per month in 1925; by then, the magazine had featured dozens of world-renowned poets.

Monroe’s steadfast, deliberate approach to editing became her trademark. She strived to hold to the “Open Door” policy and placed art and integrity above her personal tastes and those of some opinionated associates, including foreign correspondent Ezra Pound. Her eye for enduring quality made avoiding the entrapment of literary trends and the safety of classic poetic styles easier. In a 1915 essay included in Poetry, Edgar Lee Masters wrote “Miss Monroe, both as editor and as creator, has done so much for the art of poetry, in the several capacities of encouraging beginners and by way of setting a high example in poetical production, that any volume of hers commands attention.” Donald Davidson’s 1926 essay in the same volume asserted, “[Monroe] has done American poetry a good service because she had the foresight to establish her magazine at exactly the time when it was needed, and the courage to publish writers who needed an introduction to the public. She has argued for poetry, lectured for it, and tried to stimulate respect for it.” 

She succeeded on all fronts: Monroe was the editor of Poetry magazine until her death in 1936. During the final years of her life, she traveled extensively in service to literature and global literary culture. After attending the International Association of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) in Buenos Aires, she suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage and was buried in Arequipa, Peru.

Under Monroe’s guidance, Poetry became and remained a highly regarded and influential journal, surviving a world war and the Great Depression during her tenure. Monroe was an established poet in her own right and published several books during her lifetime, including Valeria: and Other Poems (1891, A.C. McClurg), The Passing Show: Five Modern Plays in Verse (1903, Houghton, Mifflin and Co.), Dance of the Seasons (1911, Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co.), and You and I (1914, The Macmillan Company). In 1931, Monroe presented her poetry library, her personal papers, and the editorial files of Poetry to the University of Chicago. Her correspondence with early 20th-century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives and on the history of contemporary literature.