Here Lies Harriet Monroe: Poetry in the Depression

This article examines an overlooked archive of newspaper clippings and unpublished correspondence related to Harriet Monroe’s death housed in the University of Chicago’s Poetry, A Magazine of Verse Records in order to facilitate literary-historical interventions in modernist periodical studies as well as modern American poetry studies. Focusing on how Poetry and Monroe were described in non-elite, mass print culture and in the popular landscape of modern America, the essay demonstrates how, during the heightened political moment of the Great Depression, Monroe and her magazine acted as figures where ideals of poetry’s role in national life were debated and stabilized.