Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Grolier Poetry Bookshop

The Grolier Poetry Book Shop ("the Grolier") is an independent bookstore on Plympton Street near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Although founded as a "fine-arts" bookstore, its focus today is solely poetry. A small (404 sq ft.), one-room store with towering bookcases, it lays claim to being the "oldest continuous bookshop" devoted solely to the sale of poetry and poetry criticism.

Over the years, the Grolier became a focus of poetic activity in the Cambridge area, which itself had, because of the influence of Harvard University, become a magnet for American poets. It became a point of call for visiting poets as well as a nexus of gossip, rumor and networking in the poetry community. Poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, and Frank O'Hara were regulars at the store during their time as undergraduates at Harvard; the poet Conrad Aiken lived upstairs from the store in its early days. Numerous other poets and writers, including Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, William Corbett, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Ferry, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, James Tate and Franz Wright, have been noted as "friends of the Grolier."