Voice in the Land

When future historians investigate the culture of the early 20th Century, they will look farther afield than the newspapers; magazines and books also tell the human news of their day. Among the files the historians will consult will be the little magazines--and one of them will doubtless be Chicago's slim Poetry: a Magazine of Verse. Last week, in a special 72-page number marking its 35 years of life, Poetry took a historical look at itself.

Poetry was founded by a frail, abstracted but determined spinster named Harriet Monroe. She spent weeks in the Chicago Public Library, reading up on contemporary British and American poets. Then she wrote letters to the ones who passed her muster, inviting them to join in starting a magazine to "give the art of poetry a voice in the land. . . ." The replies were enthusiastic; Amy Lowell sent a check for $25, and Ezra Pound (then in London) agreed to become Poetry's first, unsalaried foreign editor. Harriet Monroe knocked on wealthy Chicago doors (Samuel Insull, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Dawes), soon begged enough money to start.

New Discoveries. The first editorial offices were in the high-ceilinged front parlor of a narrow Victorian house on Cass Street (now North Wabash Avenue). Tiny Editor Monroe sat hidden behind a rolltop desk, bobbing up into view every time the door opened, sinking down again to lose herself in the pile of manuscripts. By 1936, when she died at 75, Miss Monroe had racked up an astonishing record of Poetry firsts: she was the first to publish T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, a satire on the effete culture of Boston ("In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo"-); Rupert Brooke's War Sonnets; Joyce Kilmer's Trees; Vachel Lindsay's General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, She gave the first critical recognition to Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Karl Shapiro. In Poetry D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford and Rabindranath Tagore got their first U.S. hearings. # Copyright by permission of Harcourt, Brace.

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's

Freight Handler ; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders. . . .*

Today Poetry's editorial desk is in an office on Erie Street, the Bohemian fringe of the Gold Coast. Harriet Monroe's desk is shared by two poets whom she "discovered" when they were undergraduates: Marion Strobel, a youngish (52), energetic grandmother who coaxe? subsidies for Poetry from well-to-do friends of her socially prominent doctor-husband, and writes whodunits in her spare time; and tall, handsome George Dillon, 40, an elusive bachelor who won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize for a volume of lyrics (The Flowering Stone).

Old Friends. They get only "sketchy" salaries ; Poetry has never paid its way and probably never will. But its circulation is at its highest ever: 4,000. Says Co-Editor Dillon : "The profit motive may still make for the soundest economy . . . but what we call civilization depends ... on keeping some projects healthily in the red." Poetry's contributors (3,000 manuscripts a month) sometimes donate prize money to help the magazine along. Poetry pays its contributors well, as poetry rates go: 50-c- a line.

A constant stream of visitors makes the editorial office pleasantly chaotic. On Saturdays the staff, and any friends who happen by, adjourn to an Italian restaurant for a long lunch. Says Marion Strobel: "Then we all dangle our feet in Lake Michigan and otherwise behave like poets."

*Copyright Carl Sandburg, permission of Henry Holt.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.