Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe 1860-1936, American editor, critic, and poet, b. Chicago. In 1912 she founded Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, which paid and encouraged both established and new poets. Monroe's literary reputation is based on her editorship of this important magazine. She introduced to readers such writers as Carl Sandburg, Rabindranath Tagore, Vachel Lindsay, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Frost. Her own works include several volumes of poetry; her essays Poets and Their Art (1933); the anthology she compiled with Alice Corbin Henderson, The New Poetry (1917); and her autobiography, A Poet's Life (1938).

Bibliography: See study by D. J. Cahill (1974).

Monroe, Harriet (1860–1936),Chicago poet and editor, first attained notice with her Columbian Ode (1892, published 1893), written in celebration of the World's Columbian Exposition in her native city. Besides Valeria and Other Poems (1891), she published a biography of her brother‐in‐law, John Wellborn Root (1896), and a book of five verse plays, The Passing Show (1903). With the founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912), she became a leader in the championing of new poetry, and she edited this organ until her death, remaining better known for it than for her several subsequent volumes of minor poetry. Her other works include Poets and Their Art (1926, revised 1932), a book of essays, and A Poet's Life (1937), her autobiography. The New Poetry (1932), edited in collaboration with Alice Corbin Henderson, is an anthology of 20th‐century verse. The Harriet Monroe Poetry Award established by her will is given, without competition, under the University of Chicago's direction, when sufficient income ($500) is available. Winners include Cummings, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Yvor Winters.