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chapter 2 Poetry’s Opening Door Harriet Monroe and American Modernism Among the most familiar yet misunderstood moments of twentieth-century American literary history is the founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Poetry has long been noted for its publication of nearly every key figure in Anglo-American verse of the period. But by focusing on the question of the magazine’s openness or resistance to poets later viewed as important to high modernism, historians have misread its greatest importance, which was simply to create a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. The editorial discourse of its early years, mainly generated by Monroe, with notable contributions from Alice Corbin Henderson, Ezra Pound, Eunice Tietjens, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wyatt, and others, forcefully emphasized the living culture of the present over reverence for past canons and demonstrated a marked inclination for conflict with self-appointed gatekeepers of tradition. As they forged Poetry’s identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” the American literary academy, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Monroe and her colleagues made their magazine a crucial pioneer in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-garde. And yet despite abundant avant-garde energy, Monroe and her editorial colleagues did not see themselves as tyros disdaining worldly methods and goals. Instead they sought to create a publishing format for verse that combined the aesthetic refinement and emotional complexity of “high art,” the modernized marketing practices of mass culture, and the targeted audience and professionalized demeanor of the disciplinary journal. Newcomb_How_text.indd 26 12/15/11 4:06 PM The announcement mailed to poets and interested parties in the summer of 1912 emphasized with great clarity the benefits of disciplinary specialization : “We offer [poets] . . . 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.”1 Monroe’s understanding of the importance of niche marketing was an idea of its time; poetry was lagging well behind many professional disciplines and specialized pastimes that already supported one or more publications. But in a climate that kept poetry segregated from despoiling commercialism, her approach was revolutionary . Monroe was convinced that to immerse American poetry in the cultural economies of the modern metropolis would not ruin but energize it. This motivating premise was decisively vindicated by her magazine’s immediate and lasting success. Barely a year after beginning the venture with no precedent or evidence that it could succeed, she had inaugurated what American poets and poetry lovers had long bemoaned as impossible: a stable and vigorous space that publicized virtually all the significant books of American and British verse, defended experiments in versification and subject matter, and insisted on paying poets for their work. Monroe personally maintained Poetry for twenty-four years until her death and left it so well-regarded that it continues to play a key role in the nation’s literary culture a century after its founding. Monroe’s editorial career was an achievement of monumental proportions . Yet accounts of her role in the emergence of modern American verse have often been remarkably grudging. Perhaps inevitably the long-lived, steady figure who initiates a discipline or style will be taken for granted, becoming a foil for aspirants who need to differentiate themselves from encompassing elders. Monroe shares this role with distinguished figures in a variety of fields, among them William Dean Howells, Robert Henri, John Dewey, Franz Boas, Frederick Law Olmstead, Jane Addams, W. C. Handy, Duke Ellington, and Aaron Copland. But in her case something more, and darker, is involved in the question of reputation. The widespread unwillingness to credit Monroe personally as a modernist pioneer reveals long-standing gender biases that have tinged American literary history —particularly the notion that Ezra Pound was self-evidently “the most important figure in any venture with which he was associated,” as Jayne Marek puts it.2 Poetry’s complex, often fractious relations with Pound, and its sometimes reluctant (though by no means unimportant) support poetry’s opening door 27 Newcomb_How_text.indd 27...

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