Harriet Monroe

(1860 - 1936)

In 1912 Harriet Monroe took out an advertisement to propose “a small monthly magazine of verse, which shall give the poets a chance to be heard.” She asked a group of businessmen, many of whom were already art patrons, to commit fifty dollars per year for the first five years and raised enough for a five-thousand-dollar annual budget. Poetry magazine launched in October of that year. Monroe pledged that the magazine would have an “open door” policy: “The editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse…regardless of where, or by whom, or under what theory of art.”