The Great Yeats Debate: Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Poetry Magazine’s First Guarantor’s Prize

This article addresses how W. B. Yeats and the Irish Revival were interpreted and reimagined for American audiences, particularly in the discursive statements of Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound in Poetry magazine. Yeats’s appearance in the magazine highlights a tension within Poetry between the publication’s cosmopolitanism and its investment in regional writing. In keeping with a kind of revivalist logic that valued local cultural production, Poetry in fact demonstrated a provocative engagement with regional modernism. Examining the magazine’s regionalism thus allows us to tease apart the complex and interesting ways that the Revival had an afterlife in this important modernist publication.