Harriet Monroe was a poet and editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Born in Chicago in 1860, Monroe was influenced by her father Henry’s extracurricular literary pursuits in the world of poetry. Monroe gained recognition throughout her adult life for her skill as a poet, and in 1911 she decided to use this recognition to start raising funds to begin the “Poetry” project. The publication was a great success and launched many of the poets who are part of the canon today to widespread recognition. Monroe was the editor of Poetry magazine until her death in 1936. Her efforts in creating this project are essential to understanding what we in the 21st century now consider the canon. By bringing poets who were well-known, unknown, and operating somewhere in the middle to her magazine, Monroe became one of the key poetry tastemakers of the early 20th century. She also published three anthologies, The New Poetry, in 1917, 1925 and 1932, which were enormously popular and included poems that had appeared in Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. Monroe’s influence in crafting these collections impacted not only the classroom, but the larger poetry-reading public of the time as well (given that Poetry was a magazine that could be read from any living room in America). Monroe and her work are integral parts of unlocking what poetry was considered relevant and valuable in the modernist period, prior to the creation of the popular series of Norton Anthologies which were first published in the 1960s. Born in 1885 in New York City, Louis Untermeyer took a significant interest in pursuing poetry after a career in sales with his father’s jewelry manufacturing company. Despite having minimal education and spending a good portion of his adult life away from the literary sphere, Untermeyer proved his ability as both an artist and tastemaker by writing poetry, creating anthologies, translating works and lecturing on literature. While a recognized poet in his own right, Untermeyer was most noted for his anthologies of poetry, which featured poets both living and dead from a variety of literary schools. He continued to revise the contents of his Modern American Poetry anthologies for publication in 1919, 1921, 1925, 1930, 1936, 1942, and 1950; he also published anthologies of British poetry. Unlike Harriet Monroe, who published her anthologies for the poetry-reading public and only later realized the academic potential of her work, Untermeyer specifically crafted his anthologies for the high school and collegiate-level classroom. Untermeyer worked at his literary pursuits from 1923 until his death in 1977. Untermeyer’s work shows the contemporary academic what a pre-Norton classroom anthology looked like prior to the consolidation of the canon. By selecting poetry from both the newer, experimental of Modernist poets (such as Ezra Pound) and their relevant predecessors (like Emily Dickinson), Untermeyer created an American “poetic genealogy” and consequently became an integral tastemaker in the academic sphere. Untermeyer’s anthologies have had significant influence on how we view the early twentieth century’s poetry renaissance. This poetic genealogy can give scholars a direct look at what was seen as important for students to learn prior to the dominance of the canon promoted by the Norton anthologies. The above letter was written by Untermeyer to Eunice Tietjens, who was associate editor of Poetry Magazine for 25 years. Her letters are at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Both images are from the Newberry Library, Chicago, Eunice Tietjens Papers
