Poetry (magazine)
American poetry magazine founded in 1912
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Poetry is an American poetry magazine founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Originally titled Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, it is published by the Poetry Foundation. The magazine publishes ten print issues annually and also publishes poetry, prose, translations, and archival material online.[2][3]
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Morton Dauwen Zabel (1936–1937)
George Dillon (1937–1942)
Group editorship (1942–1949)
Hayden Carruth (1949–1950)
Karl Shapiro (1950–1955)
Henry Rago (1955–1969)
Daryl Hine (1969–1977)
John Frederick Nims (1978–1983)
Joseph Parisi (1983–2003)
Christian Wiman (2003–2013)
Don Share (2013–2020)
April 2008 cover | |
| Editor-in-chief | Adrian Matejka |
|---|---|
| Former editors | Harriet Monroe (1912–1936) Morton Dauwen Zabel (1936–1937) |
| Categories | Poetry |
| Frequency | Ten issues annually |
| Circulation | 30,000[1] |
| Founder | Harriet Monroe |
| First issue | October 1912 |
| Company | Poetry Foundation |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Language | English |
| Website | Poetry Magazine |
| ISSN | 0032-2032 |
Poetry became one of the most influential English-language poetry magazines of the twentieth century. Encyclopædia Britannica states that, during Monroe's editorship, it "quickly became the world's leading English-language poetry journal" and describes it as "the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world".[4][5] Its early issues published work by poets including T. S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore.[6][7] Archival records for the magazine are held by research libraries including the University of Chicago Library and Indiana University's Lilly Library.[7][8]
In 2002, Ruth Lilly, an heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune and a longtime patron of poetry, gave $100 million to the Modern Poetry Association, the magazine's publisher.[9] The Poetry Foundation was established the following year, and the gift was later reported as worth approximately $200 million.[10][1] Since 2022, Poetry has been edited by Adrian Matejka, the first Black editor to lead the magazine.[11][12]
History
Founding and editorial policy
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, a poet, critic, and arts writer who sought to create a dedicated forum for contemporary poetry.[4][7] In 1911, Monroe secured financial support for the planned magazine by persuading one hundred Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year for five years.[13] The magazine's motto, taken from Walt Whitman, was "To have great poets there must be great audiences too".[13][7]
Monroe used the first issues to define the magazine's purpose and editorial independence. In the inaugural issue, she argued that poetry needed "her own place, her own voice", rather than the limited space available in general-interest magazines.[14] The following month, in "The Open Door", Monroe wrote that "The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine" and that the editors hoped to avoid "entangling alliances with any single class or school".[15] In a printed appeal addressed to poets, Monroe described the magazine as offering writers "a chance to be heard in their own place", outside the constraints of popular magazines.[1]
The University of Chicago Library notes that Monroe's insistence on paying contributors and establishing an annual prize helped raise the visibility and status of poetry as a literary art.[7] The Modernist Journals Project describes Poetry not only as a venue for modern poetry but also as a forum for debate over the forms and purposes of poetry in the modern age.[13]
Early reputation and modernism
The magazine established its reputation in its early years by publishing a wide range of contemporary poets and by becoming a major venue for emerging modernist poetry.[5][6] Literary scholar Helen Carr describes Poetry as "one of the best known of 'little magazines' of literary modernism" and as a periodical that exemplified the role of small magazines in the formation and dissemination of modernism.[16] Its first issue included poems by Ezra Pound, Helen Dudley, William Vaughn Moody, Arthur Davison Ficke, Grace Hazard Conkling, and Emilia Stuart Lorimer, as well as Monroe's editorial comment "The Motive of the Magazine".[5][17] Pound later served as the magazine's foreign correspondent, helping connect Monroe's Chicago-based publication to transatlantic literary networks.[4][13]
In June 1915, Poetry published T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which had been brought to Monroe's attention by Pound.[18][19] The magazine also published early or important work by writers including H.D., Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore.[6][5][7] Encyclopædia Britannica identifies the magazine with both the Chicago literary renaissance and Imagism, and describes it as having become "the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world".[5]
The magazine also became known for the range of writers published in its pages. The Poetry Foundation identifies notable poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Joyce Kilmer, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Carl Sandburg, and Margaret Walker as having appeared in Poetry.[3] Its early records, correspondence, and editorial files have been used by scholars as evidence of the development of English-language poetry in the first half of the twentieth century.[7]
After Monroe
Monroe edited the magazine until her death in 1936. The editorship then passed to Morton Dauwen Zabel and George Dillon.[7] In 1942, after Dillon stepped down to serve in the armed forces during World War II, the magazine entered a period of group editorship. Editorial work during this period was shared by several figures, including Peter De Vries, Jessica Nelson North, Hayden Carruth, Katinka Loeser, John Frederick Nims, Margedant Peters, and Marion Strobel.[20] Later mid-century editors included Carruth, Karl Shapiro, and Henry Rago.[7]
Monroe had presented her poetry library, personal papers, and the magazine's editorial files to the University of Chicago in 1931. After her death, the materials helped form the Harriet Monroe Library of Modern Poetry and became part of the university's archival holdings on Poetry and twentieth-century verse.[7] Additional records from the magazine's later history, including editorial correspondence, business files, issue proofs, author payment records, and publication files, are held by Indiana University's Lilly Library.[8]
Lilly grant
Foundation
Monroe continued to publish the magazine, until her death in 1937. From 1937 to 1941, a group series of editors published the magazine. From 1941, until the establishment of the Foundation in 2003, the magazine's publisher went by the corporate name, the Modern Poetry Association.[21] In 2003, the association received a grant from the estate of Ruth Lilly originally said to be worth over $100 million, but which grew to be about $200 million when it was given out. The grant added to her already substantial prior contributions.
The magazine learned in 2001 that it would be getting the grant. Before announcing the gift, the magazine waited a year and reconfigured its governing board, which had been concerned with fund-raising. The Poetry Foundation was created, replacing the Modern Poetry Association, and Joseph Parisi, who was editor of the magazine for two decades, briefly headed the foundation. Christian Wiman, a young critic and poet, succeeded to the editorship in 2003.[22]
Since receiving the grant, the magazine has increased its budget. For instance, poets who previously received two dollars per line now get ten.[22] In addition, the magazine continues to give out eight annual author prizes for various types of publications that have appeared in the magazine, these range per endowment from $500 to $5000.[23]
Poetry Foundation Building
Part of the Lilly grant was used to build the Poetry Center in Near North Side, Chicago. The Center, opened in 2011, holds a library open to the public, houses reading spaces, hosts school and tour groups, and provides office and editorial space for the Poetry Foundation and magazine.[24]
Editorship under the Poetry Foundation
Christian Wiman took the editorship in 2003. Partly thanks to direct-mail campaigns, the magazine's circulation has grown from 11,000 to almost 30,000. The look of the magazine was redesigned in 2005.[22]
Wiman "expressed in print a stern preference for formal poems, and a disdain for what he calls 'broken-prose confessionalism' and 'the generic, self-obsessed free-verse poetry of the seventies and eighties", according to a New Yorker magazine article.[22]
One of his top goals for the magazine was to get more people "talking about it", he has said. "I tried to put something in every issue that would be provocative in some way." Wiman hired several young, outspoken critics and encouraged them to be frank. In 2005, Wiman wrote in an editorial: "Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional and dull. ... We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair."[22]
Wiman stepped down from the editorship June 30, 2013. Poet Don Share, senior editor under Wiman, became the Editor.[25] Share stepped down in the summer of 2020, following a controversy over his decision to include a poem with racist language in an issue devoted to anti-racist poetry.[26]
After a series of guest editors in 2021–2022, including Esther Belin, Su Cho, Suzi F. Garcia, Ashley M. Jones, and Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, poet Adrian Matejka was named editor in 2022 and began the role on May 16, 2022.[27][28]
Controversial article by John Barr
In September 2006, the magazine published an essay by John Barr, then president of the Poetry Foundation (2003–13), titled "American Poetry in the New Century," which became controversial, generating many complaints and some support. After having heard a talk Barr gave on the subject, Wiman had asked Barr to submit it to the magazine.[22]
"American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today," Barr wrote. He added that poetry is nearly absent from public life, and poets too often write with only other poets in mind, failing to write for a greater public. Although M.F.A. programs have expanded greatly, the result has been more poetry but also more limited variety. He wrote that poetry has become "neither robust, resonant, nor — and I stress this quality — entertaining."[22]
Barr suggested that poets get experience outside the academy. "If you look at drama in Shakespeare's day, or the novel in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time."[22]
Dana Goodyear, in an article in The New Yorker reporting and commenting on Poetry magazine and The Poetry Foundation, wrote that Barr's essay was directly counter to the ideas of the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, eight decades before. In a 1922 editorial, Monroe wrote about newspaper verse: "These syndicated rhymers, like the movie-producers, are learning that it pays to be good, [that one] gets by giving the people the emotions of virtue, simplicity and goodness, with this program paying at the box-office." Monroe wanted to protect poets from the demands of popular taste, Goodyear wrote, while Barr wants to induce poets to appeal to the public. Goodyear acknowledged that popular interest in poetry has collapsed since the time of Monroe's editorial.[22]
Wiman has said he agrees with many of Barr's points about contemporary poetry.[22]
Awards
In 2011, and in 2014, Poetry won National Magazine Awards for General Excellence.[29][30][31]
