Right now the Chicago-based magazine Poetry
stands among the most prestigious journals of mainstream American verse, or what has been called "official verse culture." Eighty years ago, however, Poetry
magazine mattered a lot more: under founding editor Harriet Monroe, Poetry
helped create the careers of almost every major modernist poet, publishing, for example, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Carl Sandburg when their merits were still much in dispute. This big volume centers around the epistolary negotiations Monroe conducted during her 24 years at the journal, mostly the affirmations, negations, asides, outbursts, money-needs and apologies of the poets, along with some of Monroe's courteous and generous replies. Ezra Pound (Monroe's eyes and ears in England during the early years) comes off as typically engaged, irascible, and brilliantly coercive; Williams's letters sound searching and steely; Stevens's are warmly reserved and opinionated. Nor are the major modernists the whole tale. Amy Lowell's and Sara Teasdale's eventful lives occupy nearly a chapter each. Vachel Lindsay, famed for his performances, tells Monroe "I have tried several times to quit reciting"; the leftist Muriel Rukeyser writes to "explain why I resent the label" of propagandist. U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins provides a brief foreword, while Young and Parisi (the journal's current senior editor and editor-in-chief respectively) entertainingly flesh out the magazine's history. Also included are the correspondence of Monroe's successors, among them the poet Karl Shapiro (who left the journal's finances in perilous shape) and his successor Henry Rago (who helped rescue them afterward). The result is a book of more than academic interest detailing not just poets' relations with editors, but the creation and promotion of a fledgling American literature. (Oct.)
