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

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

since 1912. It is one of the leading monthly

poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...

journals in the English-speaking world. Founded by poet and arts columnist

Harriet Monroe Harriet Monroe (December 23, 1860 – September 26, 1936) was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of ''Poetry'' magazine, which she established in 1912 ...

, who built it into an influential publication, it is now published by the

Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation is a United States 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 philanthrop ...

. 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 magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'', 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 philanthropist and Lilly heiress,

Ruth Lilly Ruth Lilly (August 2, 1915 – December 30, 2009) was an American philanthropist, the last surviving great-grandchild of Eli Lilly, founder of the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical firm, and heir to the Lilly family fortune. A lifelong re ...

History

The magazine was founded in 1912 by

, an author who was then working as an art critic for the ''

Chicago Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN (AM), WGN radio and ...

''. 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 Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biography''. New York: Oxford University ...

'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 Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

. The magazine published the early works of H.D.,

Robert Frost Robert Lee Frost (March26, 1874January29, 1963) was an American poet. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American Colloquialism, colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New E ...

Langston Hughes James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. An early innovator of jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harl ...

Edna St. Vincent Millay Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyric poetry, lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted Feminism, feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. ...

and

Marianne Moore Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernism, modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. In 1968 Nobel Prize in Li ...

. The magazine discovered such poets as

Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poet ...

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 John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

. Contributors have included

William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th century in literature, 20th-century literature. He was ...

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Thakur (; anglicised as Rabindranath Tagore ; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengalis, Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengal Renai ...

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His '' Spring and All'' (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's '' The Waste Land'' (1922). ...

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

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 w ...

, Charlotte Wilder,

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than 60 books. He is associated with the Black Mountain poets, although his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. Creeley was close with Charle ...

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 traditi ...

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 Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 25, 2004) was the last surviving member of the Objectivist poets, still publishing and performing poetry well into his 90s. Early life Rakosi was born in Berlin and lived there and in Hungary until 191 ...

Dorothy Richardson Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 – 17 June 1957) was a British author and journalist. Author of ''Pilgrimage'', a sequence of 13 semi-autobiographical novels published between 1915 and 1967—though Richardson saw them as chapters of o ...

Peter Viereck Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American writer, poet, and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for ''Terror and Decorum'', a collection of poetry.

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 Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was ...

Frank O'Hara Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure i ...

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 Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of th ...

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta 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 influentia ...

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and ...

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 litera ...

, 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 three ...

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

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

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 Henry Rago (1915–1969) was a poet, educator, and editor. Overview Rago was editor of ''Poetry Magazine'' for 14 years from 1955-1969. He was also a Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago jointly in the Divinity School ...

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 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. 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 was editor of the magazine for two decades, briefly headed the foundation.

Christian Wiman Christian Wiman (born August 31, 1966) is an American poet, translator and editor. Biography Raised in the small West Texas town of Snyder, he graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford Uni ...

, 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 one 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 Chi ...

. 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 may refer to: * A resident of New York: ** A resident of New York City and its suburbs *** List of people from New York City ** A resident of the New York (state), State of New York *** Demographics of New York (state) * ''The New Yor ...

'' 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 differen ...

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, 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 Adrian Matejka is an American poet and author of ''The Devil's Garden'' and ''Mixology''. His most decorated work is ''The Big Smoke'', which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulit ...

, 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 ( 23 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 has said he agrees with many of Barr's points 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.

Legacy

A Beirut-based literary magazine, ''

Shi'r ''Shi'r'' () was an avant-garde and modernist monthly literary magazine with a special reference to poetry. The magazine was published in Beirut, Lebanon, between 1957 and 1970 with a three-year interruption. The founders were two leading litera ...

'', was named after Poetry.

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

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 Magazines established in 1912 Magazines published in Chicago Monthly magazines published in the United States Poetry Foundation Poetry magazines published in the United States