''Poetry'' (founded as ''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse'') has been published in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

since 1912. It is one of the leading monthly

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

journals in the English-speaking world. Founded by Harriet Monroe, it is now published by the

Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from ''Poetry'' magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ru ...

. In 2007 the magazine had a circulation of 30,000, and printed 300 poems per year out of approximately 100,000 submissions.Goodyear, Dana
"The Moneyed Muse: What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?"
article, ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'', double issue, February 19 and February 26, 2007 It is sometimes referred to as ''Poetry—Chicago''. ''Poetry'' has been financed since 2003 with a $200 million bequest from

Ruth Lilly Ruth (or its variants) may refer to: Places France * Château de Ruthie, castle in the commune of Aussurucq in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département of France Switzerland * Ruth, a hamlet in Cologny United States * Ruth, Alabama * Ruth, Ar ...

History

The magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, an author who was then working as an art critic for the ''

Chicago Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television a ...

''. She wrote at that time:

"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 hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They 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. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."

In a circular she sent to poets, Monroe said the magazine offered:

"First, a chance to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine. In other words, while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty."

"In the first decade of its existence, 'Poetry''became the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world." T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was published in ''Poetry''. ''Prufrock'' was brought to Monroe's attention by early contributor and foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound. The magazine published the early works of H.D., Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and

Marianne Moore Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Early life Moore was born in Kirkwood ...

. The magazine discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks,

James Merrill James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for ''Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyri ...

, and John Ashbery. Contributors have included

William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He resh ...

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...

Joyce Kilmer Alfred Joyce Kilmer (December 6, 1886 – July 30, 1918) was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled "Trees" (1913), which was published in the collection ''Trees and Other Poems'' in 1914. Though a prolific poet wh ...

Carl Sandburg Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...

, Charlotte Wilder,

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Char ...

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

Basil Bunting Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of '' Briggflatts'' in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist traditio ...

Yone Noguchi was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He is known in the west as Yone Noguchi. He was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Biography Early life in Japan Nog ...

, Carl Rakosi, Dorothy Richardson,

Peter Viereck Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American poet and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection ''Terror and Decorum''.Louis Zukofsky Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge a ...

, Charles Reznikoff, E. E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara,

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century f ...

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

Elsa Gidlow Elsa Gidlow (29 December 1898 – 8 June 1986) was a British-born, Canadian-American poet, freelance journalist, philosopher and humanitarian. She is best known for writing ''On a Grey Thread'' (1923), the first volume of openly lesbian love ...

, and

Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the thr ...

, Max Michelson among others. The magazine was instrumental in launching the

Imagist Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is someti ...

and Objectivist poetic movements. A. R. Ammons once said, "the histories of modern poetry in America and of ''Poetry'' in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable." However, in the early years, East Coast newspapers made fun of the magazine, with one calling the idea "Poetry in Porkopolis". Author and poet Jessica Nelson North was an editor. Henry Rago joined the magazine in 1954 and became editor the following year. The magazine first established its online presence in 1998 at poetrymagazine.org and, after a 2003 grant from Ruth Lilly, moved to poetryfoundation.org in 2005. Publication in ''Poetry'' is highly selective and consists of three increasingly critical editorial rounds. With a publication rate of submissions at about 1%, the magazine is "one of the most difficult to get ublished in.

Lilly grant

Foundation

Monroe continued to publish the magazine, until her death in 1937. From 1941, until the establishment of the Foundation in 2003, the magazine's publisher went by the corporate name, the Modern Poetry Association. In 2003, the association received a grant from the estate of

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

was created (replacing the Modern Poetry Association), and Joseph Parisi, who had been editor of the magazine for two decades, briefly headed the foundation.

Christian Wiman Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in the small west Texas town of Snyder. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Vi ...

, a young critic and poet, succeeded to the editorship in 2003. Since receiving the grant, the magazine has increased its budget. For instance, poets who previously received two dollars per line now get ten. 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.

Poetry Foundation Building

Part of the Lilly grant was used to build the Poetry Center in

Near North Side, Chicago The Near North Side is the eighth of Chicago's 77 community areas. It is the northernmost of the three areas that constitute central Chicago, the others being the Loop and the Near South Side. The community area is located north and east of the ...

. 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.

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. 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 New Yorker or ''variant'' primarily refers to: * A resident of the State of New York ** Demographics of New York (state) * A resident of New York City ** List of people from New York City * ''The New Yorker'', a magazine founded in 1925 * '' The ...

'' magazine article. 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 Logrolling is the trading of favors, or ''quid pro quo'', such as vote trading by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. In organizational analysis, it refers to a practice in which different o ...

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." Wiman stepped down from the editorship June 30, 2013. Poet

Don Share Don Share is an American poet. He is the former chief editor of ''Poetry'' magazine in Chicago. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Career Share, who was named the editor-in-chief of ''Poetry'' in 2013, previously served there as Senior Editor. E ...

, senior editor under Wiman, became the Editor. 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. After a series of guest editors, poet Adrian Matejka, a writing professor, and past Indiana State Poet Laureate, was named editor in 2022.

Controversial article by John Barr

In September 2006, the magazine published an essay by John Barr, then president of the

(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. "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." Barr suggested that poets get experience outside the academy. "If you look at drama in

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

'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." Dana Goodyear, in an article in ''

'' 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, hat onegets 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. Wiman said he agrees with a lot of what Barr says about contemporary poetry.

Awards

In 2011, and in 2014, ''Poetry'' won

National Magazine Awards The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...

for General Excellence.

Notes and references

Specific references:

General references

*Peter Jones (ed.): ''Imagist Poetry'' (Penguin, 1972).
Historical note at the magazine Web site''Boston Globe'' article on grant
h1>

External links

*
Poetry Foundation''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse'' (1911-1962)
Records at th
University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Records at Indiana University
''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse''
at the Modernist Journals Project: a cover-to-cover, searchable digital edition of the magazine's first ten years, from vol. 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1912) to vol. 21, no. 3 (Dec. 1922). PDFs of these 123 issues may be downloaded for free from the MJP website.

– A poetry anthology celebrating the magazine's centennial anniversary, by Don Share and Christian Wiman * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Poetry 1912 establishments in Illinois Monthly magazines published in the United States Magazines established in 1912 Magazines published in Chicago Poetry Foundation Poetry magazines published in the United States