Dear Editor:
A History of “Poetry” in Letters: The First Fifty Years, 1912-1962
Compiled and edited by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young, introductions and commentary by Joseph Parisi, foreword by Billy Collins
Norton, 473 pages, $39.95
In 1911, a 50-year-old failed playwright and minor poet named Harriet Monroe returned to Chicago from a trip around the world. She was struck by the force of artistic activity in her city: music, theater, dance and architecture all thriving. But literature, her passion, Monroe found to be held in contempt–much of it merited because literature, particularly poetry, was lacking the energy and freshness of other arts.
So Monroe decided to start a little magazine devoted to publishing and criticizing poetry. She gathered funds, telling donors she wanted poets to be heard “in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine.” In October 1912, Monroe released the first issue of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse.
Her magazine has endured for 90 years. Merely outliving its founder (and some half-dozen subsequent editors) has made Poetry unique in a field noted for rapid extinctions. So has the ingenuity with which the magazine reinvented itself through two world wars, a depression and a series of vast cultural shifts. Despite relentless financial pressure, Poetry became a haven for avant-garde work and a mainstream cultural icon. It published, often for the first time, the work of nearly every major poet in America and abroad: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke.
Behind the scenes, Monroe and her successors corresponded with, it seems, everyone with a stake in poetry. “Dear Editor” is a selection of more than 600 letters to and from the editors during the magazine’s first half-century. This may not sound like scintillating reading, but along with commentaries and introductions by current Editor in Chief Joseph Parisi, the quirky mix of passion, argument, outrage, gossip, revelation, flattery, fawning and boasting makes a lively, informative book. “Dear Editor” lets readers overhear insider conversations about modern poetry while sparing them the drudgery of sorting, reading and rejecting manuscripts.
The loudest, most provocative voice in these letters is Ezra Pound’s. In his determination to renew and revivify poetry, Pound catalyzed the movement against stodgy, safe platitudes that characterized so much writing of the time. But he was abrasive, crude, impolitic and condescending (“I do not love my fellow man and I don’t propose to pretend to”). One thing “Dear Editor” makes clear is that without Monroe’s counterbalancing skills, Pound’s message would not have had its wide hearing. Every other magazine he worked with failed.
From the first, his letters are charged with a warrior’s ferocity: “As touching Boston & New York–if their press is too much amused by Chicago’s having a Poetry magazine you might send me some of the clippings and perhaps I can riposte on them from a less expected quarter.” He saw himself as the magazine’s editorial force and claimed the sort of ownership that suited him best: trying to dictate who got in and who did not, and who won prizes; writing editorials, reviews and manifestoes; leaving the hard work of fundraising, production, distribution and daily correspondence to Monroe. For Pound, it was their magazine, not her magazine, and his letters to Monroe shrieked. “We must,” he told her, “be taken seriously at once. We must be the voice not only for the U.S. but internationally.”
It is fascinating to watch Monroe manage Pound. She gives in when it suits, for example agreeing to give the first annual prize for best poem to Yeats while also finding a way to reward her own choice, Vachel Lindsay. And she rejects Pound’s advice–sometimes tactfully, sometimes with a well-deserved slap–when appropriate. Hearing one too many times that she is unable to recognize good new work, Monroe tells Pound, “You can be pretty sure that nothing that has any life in it gets by us.” Later, fed up with his endless recommendations of inferior English poets, she writes, then (ever the diplomat) decides to strike out, a typical advisory gem: “Oh little indoor England and its tiresome little adulteries! For the love of heaven, get out doors!”
The early correspondence includes many significant voices other than Pound’s. They often speak as we have never heard them before, revealing the personality hidden behind the poetry, the official statements, the biographical tomes. There is, for example, a delighted William Carlos Williams thanking Monroe for giving his work its first major exposure, saying, “I beg to acknowledge my face as shining very delightfully in your excellent mirror.” Within four years, he is much cockier: “No poet expects to earn money by his verse. If he does he is a fool and had better be disillusioned at the start.” Still later, a more well-known Williams formally announces that all future poems of his will cost Monroe a minimum of $50.
Wallace Stevens agrees to a reordering of the sections in his masterpiece, “Sunday Morning,” though he later reprints the poem in his books in their original order. He appends this brief, humble biographical note: “I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, am thirty-five years old, a lawyer, reside in New York and have published no books.” Amy Lowell, back-stabbing the man who engineered her breakthrough into Poetry, writes that Pound “has always thought of life as a grand game of bluff” and “never has learned the wisdom of Lincoln’s famous adage about not being able to fool all the people all the time.” D.H. Lawrence, during World War I, writes to ask how poetry is going in America. He adds, “There is none in England: the muse has gone, like swallows in winter.” Langston Hughes, in 1926, tells Monroe: “I am very proud of having been published in POETRY. It’s something every poet wants to achieve.”
Other letters have an intimate charm that allows readers to savor the lost art of literary letter-writing. There is, for instance, this comment from a little-known poet and friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, Arthur D. Ficke, who compliments Monroe on publishing Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”: “there emerges the gravest, softest, most subtly modulated voice I’ve ever heard–a voice on tiptoe at dawn!” William Rose Benet sends letters illustrated by his own snappy cartoons, and we follow the saga of Sara Teasdale’s relationship with Vachel Lindsay (a failed romance orchestrated by Monroe). Monroe’s associate editor, Alice Henderson, writes to tell Monroe with electrifying accuracy “the real trouble is that Ezra has no sense of values.”
The final third of “Dear Editor” follows the magazine after Monroe’s death in 1936, as editorship passes to George Dillon, then Peter De Vries, John F. Nims, Hayden Carruth, Karl Shapiro and Henry Rago. Most have a characteristic tone–De Vries’ wit, Shapiro’s edginess, Rago’s generosity of spirit–and attract correspondence from a wide range of poets. But the core issues remain the same, (money, righteous belief in a particular kind of poetry, a hunger for gossip, a jockeying for position), and the fascination of the exchanges remains notably high. This is a book of treasured voices brought back to life, in a context where we have not encountered them before.
It may be impossible for readers to imagine that publishing a poetry magazine could at one time actually change our culture, that such a thing could matter enough to be revolutionary. Sadly, it may be impossible for poets to imagine that publishing in a magazine could once mean that much. Especially when the magazine was not based in New York City. “Dear Editor” reminds us of those lost possibilities for genuine significance. It’s also a chattery delight.
