The history of Poetry

Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters The First Fifty Years 1912-1962.

Compiled and Edited by
Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Pp.473. Illustrations, index. Cloth, $35.00).

Reviewed by Roland Cross

There used to be a maxim (or was it a party-line?) issued by American university English Departments that went something like this: Modern American poetry was created within a 100 yards of wherever Ezra Pound happened to be on any given day in 1911 or 1912. The hyperbole central to that statement always lent to its credibility, but, in light of this recent volume, splendidly compiled and edited by the current editor in chief and senior editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the statement should probably undergo some slight revision. Modern American poetry was created within a 100 yards of wherever Ezra Pound happened to be on any given day in 1911 and 1912 ... and at 543 Cass Street (now Wabash Avenue) in Chicago, Illinois. It was there that Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson set up shop in 1912, and the impact that their Poetry eventually had on American poetry is almost impossible to overstate.

For starters, the list of poets initially published in the pages of Poetry reads like a who's who list of modern American verse; Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost are just some of the authors Monroe published when they were young and all-but-unknown. Pound infamously served as the magazine's Foreign Correspondent during the early years, and his missives from Europe, as well as his epistolary harangues against Monroe, serve as much as entertaining dish as they do seriously held aesthetic disputes between contemporaries.

Pound was always suspicious and contemptuous of Monroe's broader vision and consistently attacked her for her sympathies toward native writers such as Vachel Lindsay. This volume faithfully documents their oftentimes antagonistic relationship, and suggests that the patience with which Monroe handled her European scout was apparently boundless. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pound publically asserted that he had had to force Monroe to publish anything that was of merit during the period of his commission. While Monroe capably responded publicly and privately and several times, she never took such offence as to cut Pound from the pages of her magazine entirely. One 1934 exchange between Monroe and T.S. Eliot has the latter commiserating with Poetry's editor over Pound's nastier side: "I hope you don't take the violence of his style too seriously; I am completely habituated to it myself."

The problems with Monroe's most infamous staff-member aside, the gossip and personal attacks exchanged in Dear Editor are alone worth the price of admission: Edgar Lee Masters' attack of Amy Lowell for her treatment of Vachel Lindsay ("she was not a critic at all, nor a stylist at all ... she got away with more murder than anyone in my time"); Pound's report that he, like many others, was anxiously anticipating the death of Marianne

Moore's mother ("but every one . . . seems cordially to desire the demise of the old 'un. An' anyhow she can't live forever . . . ."); Arthur Davison Ficke's perfect denunciation of E.E. Cummings in his targets recognizable style.

Although differences in aesthetics and personalities seem to litter the pages of this history, I particularly appreciated the recurring attention paid to the financial struggles of each successive editor of Poetry. Fortunately, Monroe was not a novice when it came to shrewd business operations. Beginning with Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor's suggested financial plan (to get 100 benefactors to underwrite the magazine for 5 years at $50 apiece per year), Monroe was constantly dealing with financial problems. Nevertheless, she seemed generous to her writers, sending cash to several when their personal circumstances grew dire.

Likewise, managing benefactors was a part time job for Monroe. Amy Lowell, who for a time gave $200 annual donations, became a regular thorn in Monroes side, reminding the editor of her generosity when she felt the magazine did not "adequately reflect her several gifts." Later, when the magazine's future seemed especially questionable, Poety was assisted by grants, such as the 1933 "emergency grant" from the Carnegie Corporation (which was repeated in double and quadruple amounts in subsequent years).

Further grants were supplied by other organizations. After Gus Bowe, Chief Justice of the Municipal Court

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of Chicago, had the Modern Poetry Association, the then-new publisher of Poetry, organized as a non-profit organization in 1941, fund-raising campaigns became the permanent path down which editors traveled for financial support. And, starting in 1955, J. Patrick Lannan, a financial advisor for the magazine, arranged "Poetry Day," what became a major annual social and fundraising event (a reading, a formal dinner, and an auction) for the magazine. The speaker for the first event was Robert Frost, and the venture brought the magazine almost $29,000.

The editors of this volume have done a remarkable job assembling these fragmentary exchanges into a cohesive picture of the magazine's first fifty years. Somewhere along the line, though, the reception/perception of the "little" magazine changed. Monroe's vision, nurtured and developed by Zabel, Dillon, DeVries, Nims, Carruth, Shapiro, and Rago, became an established voice in the world of poetry and criticism. Writing to then-editor Karl Shapiro in 1950, T. S. Eliot put it best:

For a good many years, I think, Poetry has ceased to belong to the category of the "little magazine." One of the distinguished marks of the "little magazine" is that it should be not only little, but shortlived. The little magazine, if no vicissitudes overtake it sooner, is limited in life to the literary editorship of one editor .... Poetry, in fact, is not a little magazine but an INSTITUTION.

It was in existence before most of its younger contributors were born: to some of them it must seem as ancient of days as the American Constitution or the Atlantic Monthly.

Parisi and Young catalogue the anguish and struggle that allowed such an "institution" to establish itself. The result of their work is not always the prettiest picture, but their study is always enjoyable reading and essential to those interested in the development of modern American poetry.

Roland R. Cross has degrees from Denison University, University of Missouri-Columbia, and St. Louis University School of Law. He is currently an attorney with Brown, Hay & Stephens in Springfield, Illinois.

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