Harriet Monroe

Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, and patron of the arts. Monroe is best known as the founder and long time editor of Poetry Magazine. She was born in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from the Visitation Academy of Georgetown, D.C., in 1879, and afterward devoted herself to literary work.

Monroe was the first editor at Poetry Magazine when she founded it in 1912. From her position as editor, she played a role in the development of modern poetry, both as an early publisher and as a supporter of poets such as Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams , Carl Sandburg and others.

Additionally, Monroe was a long time correspondent of the poets she supported, and her letters provide a wealth of information on the thoughts and motives of modernist poets. She was also a member of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Ogle County, Illinois.

Monroe was a member of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Ogle County, Illinois, and is mentioned in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City.

She was the sister-in-law of the Chicago architect John Wellborn Root.

She died in Arequipa, Peru.

Harriet Monroe's Works:

Valeria and Other Poems, [Chicago, IL], 1891.
Commemoration Ode, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1892, republished as The Columbian Ode, W. I. Way (Chicago, IL), 1893.
John Wellborn Root: A Study of His Life and Work, Houghton, Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1896.
The Passing Show: Five Modern Plays in Verse, Houghton, Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1903.
The Dance of Seasons, Ralph Fletcher Seymour (Chicago, IL), 1911.
You and I, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1914.
(Editor with Alice Corbin Henderson) The New Poetry: An Anthology, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917, revised and enlarged as The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1923.
The Difference and Other Poems, Covici-McGee (Chicago, IL), 1924.
Poets and Their Art, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1926, revised and enlarged edition, 1932.
Chosen Poems: A Selection from My Books of Verse, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1935.
A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1938.