Chicago Poetry

A POET'S LIFE--Harriet Monroe--Macmillan ($5).

Some day the brief cultural flowering of Chicago before and during the War may seem to historians a matter of genuine literary significance. Now it looks like a forced, half-artificial, overenthusiastic affair that was principally important because it gave audiences to Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay and Sherwood Anderson, and because it produced the magazine, Poetry.

In the summer of 1911, a frail, 50-year-old spinster named Harriet Monroe began knocking on the doors of wealthy Chicagoans, trying to get 100 of them to pledge $50 annually for the support of a magazine of modern verse. Charles Deering, Samuel Insull, Cyrus McCormick, Charles & Rufus Dawes came in; Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck stayed out. By June, 1912, she had more than 100 signatures on her five-year pledges, an income of more than $5,200 a year for her magazine.

Last week the story of Poetry was meticulously told in Harriet Monroe's posthumous autobiography (she died Sept. 26, 1936). Although that story was the climax of her career, it made up the dullest chapters of her book. Long (488 pages), overcrowded with the names of poets, A Poet's Life seems both tired and genteel, as if Harriet Monroe had made a last attempt to make her vehement, impoverished, helter-skelter poets intelligible and respectable to plain middleclass, middle-Western citizens, but found their careers as contradictory as their poems.

Harriet Monroe was apparently the only person in Chicago who could have made such an attempt. Born there in 1860, she always regarded it as a village. Her father was a well-read, moderately successful lawyer who could not keep track of money, complained about his wife's hats to her milliner, fought constantly and sometimes fiercely with his wife about her extravagance. Overawed and tormented by an older sister, Harriet was educated in a convent in Georgetown, D. C., grew dreamy, introspective and so romantic that her admirers were unable to measure up to her ideal of a lover. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood, had published a few verses, when in 1891 she got the commission to write a poem for the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition. Opponents wanted to replace her with John Greenleaf Whittier, then 85. Despite illness, an operation, a nervous attack, Harriet Monroe finished her ode in time, demanded and received $1,000 for it, had the satisfaction of hearing it read before an audience of 120,000, its chorus sung by 5,000 voices. Because the New York World published it without permission before the reading, she sued the paper, won $5,000 more. But her verse plays were unsuccessful, her travels--to Arizona, London, around the world--gave her interests but not inspiration. She did not find that until she started Poetry.

Poetry introduced an extraordinary group of poets to the U. S., from Yeats and T. S. Eliot to Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Almost every contemporary English and American poet of distinction appeared in its pages or was involved in its battles. But although readers of A Poet's Life can gain some insight into modern poetry, may pick up minor items of literary information (such as Louis Untermeyer's smug dismissal of Eliot's first poems), they are likely to be left wondering how so much literary excitement could have been made so dull in the telling.

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