Harold Monro

book reviews ages to escape his eye: in a passage on pages 389 / 413, he corrects Ellmann's error in Gertrude Chiltern's name in An Ideal Husband, but he misses the error in the play's title, which Ellmann renders as The Ideal Husband. Throughout his volume, however, Schroeder gives the title correctly! Obviously, anyone wishing to write on Wilde, particularly his biography, would be foolhardy not to consult carefully Schroeder's volume. KARL BECKSON ________________ Brooklyn College, CUNY Harold Monro Dominic Hibberd. Harold Monro: Poetry of the New Age. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xii + 300 pp. $65.00 DOMINIC HIBBERD'S biography presents a richly detailed account not only of Harold Monro's troubled existence, but also of literary life in London in the early decades of the twentieth century. Monro was in the thick of everything: publisher of and mentor to many of the era's most famous poets, he influenced and was influenced by the Georgian "movement," modernism, Imagism, Futurism, and war poetry. This jack-of-all-trades approach may have contributed to his comparative absence from most literary histories of the period—he is not easy to categorize —but it allows Hibberd to make the plausible claim that Monro deserves modern critics' attention as an "enabler" of the era's most significant literary achievements. "He should be remembered with honour ," F. S. Flint said after Monro's death: Hibberd, heeding Flint's words, has produced a thoughtful and impassioned attempt to reestablish Harold as the pivot about which most poets of the period turned. Monro was founder-editor of three periodicals, each of which published some of the most important poetry of the day. He tried to adopt a neutral position in the fiery battles raging between the various "isms," balancing his involvement in the first Georgian Poetry volume by publishing Pound's Des Imagistes at the same time (Monro's relations with Pound were complex, shaped by both mutual dislike and guarded mutual respect). History has remembered that Monro rejected Eliot's "Prufrock," but the truth (Hibberd argues) is that it arrived with "quantities of lesser material" just before the war, which was "not the time to be pestering a worried editor": Monro seems to have read the poem properly for the first time in 1915, and he clearly admired it enormously. Hibberd works hard to refute such damaging stories about Monro's reactionary tastes, repeatedly stressing his subject's vision—Monro's ability 437 ELT 46 : 4 2003 not only to recognize shifts in modern poetry, but also to anticipate and foster them. In many ways, Hibberd's biography is persuasive. Monro emerges as undoubtedly more than a "mere" Georgian (Hibberd notes that Monro was one of the first to use the term pejoratively); his innovative Poetry Bookshop was hardly a "Georgian citadel" but rather an important meeting place for a range of leaders of the avant garde. Pound, Eliot, H.D., Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein, Charlotte Mew, Rubert Brooke—the list of authors who spent time with Harold and with each other in the bookshop is long and extraordinarily diverse. For many years, Monro arranged regular poetry readings (hordes showed up to hear Yeats read Celtic lyrics in 1913); Hibberd has reproduced Monro's notes on these readings, and they provide a fascinating insight into both the range of material covered (Pound followed by Brooke followed by E. S. Lorimer) and the tenor of the meetings. We learn, for example, that Monro's rendition of Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" was a "failure," as was Gordon Bottomley's "The End of the World" ("My fault?" Monro scribbled interrogatively under "Remarks "). Other entries highlight Monro's conviction that good poetry should lend itself to oral delivery; Pound's "La Fraisne," for example, was "excellent to read, [and] well received as usual." Yet while Hibberd convinces us of Monro's efficacy as a publisher and patron, his attempts to identify Harold as a forgotten literary "great" are hindered by some decidedly weak poetry. Impartiality in an editor is one thing; impartiality in a poet looks like a lack of conviction. Monro drew on newly emerging poetic methods "without...