Harriet Monroe became famous for her magazine, but even more so, her open-door policy. There were many poets that just wouldn't get published, authors listed above, because their works were not accepted in society. T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was considered "pathological" and Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems were "incompetent". What are they considered now? Great masterpieces of the 20th century, that's what they are considered now; T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" has been called, by many, the greatest poem of the 1900s. Carl Sandburg's "Chicago Poems" is now prized by many. All of this recognition should be credited to Poetry's creator: Harriet Monroe.
Poetry, the first 180 volumes, contain a heaping amount of 29,000 poems and about 4, 725 poets. Its traslations come from many languages: Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Gaelic, Indian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, and Russian. This shows that Poetry's did not stop in America, but spread worlwide, to other countries, continents, and languages.
[...] While on its way to becoming a very successful magazine, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse hit a few bumps on the road. Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign ambassador, became a very hard person to work with; mad at Monroe for not turning her magazine into an imagist one, he began his struggle with poetry. His poets gave him work that even he found unsatisfactory, but when his own poems were gaining bad reviews, he became furious. Critics pointed out the “school-boy errors” in Pound's work, and continued to criticize him until Pound, finally fed up, stopped writing any poetry. [...]
[...] The works of the aforementioned made the magazine famous and a good place to print for these aspiring poets. Some poets included Malcolm Cowley, Glenway Wescott, Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, Emanuel Carnevali, Laura Riding, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Richard Eberhart, and Robert McAlmon. Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most visible. She was first printed in 1917; her poem “First in 1918 became famous because it embodied the jazz age. Monroe also printed young poets. Among those was Yvor Winters years old, who stood out to Monroe when she compared him to other students that came to her with their poetry. [...]
[...] He allowed Monroe to make changes to his poems (as in the case of his Sunday Morning, which Monroe only agreed to print as long as she changed the structure and took a few lines away, to which Stevens agreed). Happy to have gained creative control, Monroe printed many of his poems. She didn't do it solely because she had the power to make his poems better, because she really was a huge fan of Stevens. He wrote good poetry, and Monroe gladly printed it. [...]
[...] She wanted a magazine that would not include poetry as space fillers at the ends of stories, but a magazine that would be all poetry, with stories acting as space fillers at the ends of poems. Monroe worked as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune for five years, 1909-1914. During those five years she studied the art, and not only what it was quality-wise, but how it was different from others. She studies different movements in art. She looked at how art changed in time. [...]
[...] Newspapers across the country wrote articles wondering what would become of poetry if Monroe's magazine were to close: Monroe received many small donations from readers who were desperate to keep the magazine running. Monroe increased her subscription fee. Poets were requesting payment”. In 1933, Monroe received an emergency grant. The magazine still faced struggle, but it was still running. The readers and poets, with major help from Monroe, were able to keep the magazine working. The Great Depression affected the magazine in more ways than one. [...]
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