History
The magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, who was working as an art critic of the Chicago Tribune. She wrote at that time:
"The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."
In a circular she sent to poets, Monroe said the magazine offered:
- "First, 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, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty."
"In the first decade of its existence, became the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world." From 1941 to until the establishment of the Foundation in 2003, the magazine was published by the Modern Poetry Association. The magazine discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was published in Poetry. Prufrock was brought to Monroe's attention by early contributor and foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound. The magazine published the early works of H.D., Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore,
Contributors have included, William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, William Carlos Williams, Joyce Kilmer, Carl Sandburg, Charlotte Wilder, Robert Creeley, Wallace Stevens,, Basil Bunting, Yone Noguchi, Carl Rakosi, Dorothy Richardson, Peter Viereck, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams, among others. The magazine was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements.
A.R. Ammons once said, "the histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable." However, in the early years, East Coast newspapers made fun of the magazine, with one calling the idea "Poetry in Porkopolis".
Author and poet Jessica Nelson North was an editor. Henry Rago joined the magazine in 1954 and became editor the following year.
Publication in Poetry is highly selective and consists of three increasingly critical editorial rounds.
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