Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, she played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Because she was a longtime correspondent of the poets she supported, her letters provide a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives. Though Century magazine published her poem, "With a Copy of Shelley," in 1889, she became disillusioned by the limited earnings available for poets, saying, "The minor painter or sculptor was honored with large annual awards in our greatest cities, while the minor poet was a joke of the paragraphs, subject to the popular prejudice that his art thrived best on starvation in a garret." She became a freelance correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, and was commissioned to write a commemorative ode for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to North America.