The Little Magazine That Could

By Paul Gray

THE "POETRY" ANTHOLOGY: 1912-1977

Edited by Daryl Hine and Joseph Parisi

Houghton Mifflin; 555 pages; $20 hardcover, $10.95 paperback

In 1912 a middle-aged woman named Harriet Monroe persuaded 100 fellow Chicagoans to contribute $50 apiece for five years running. Why? To underwrite a monthly magazine that would publish the best new poetry. As an investment, the project had its drawbacks. First, no one had ever gone broke underestimating America's hunger for good verse. Second, even if acceptable, bill-paying poetry was available, Harriet Monroe seemed singularly ill-equipped to find it. Her own best efforts in the field amounted to little but boosterism: "Hail to thee, fair Chicago! On thy brow/ America, thy mother, lays a crown ..."

Nevertheless, this Windy City bard founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Within three years she printed an odd-looking work that opened with six lines of Italian and then proceeded: "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table ..." Nothing quite like T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had ever appeared before. The expatriate gentleman from St. Louis and the lady from Chicago put each other on the map.

Stranger things than Poetry have happened in publishing, but not many. The magazine never thrived, but it survived, outlasting decades of precarious financing, attempted coups by competing schools of poets and unvarying public in difference. Its monthly circulation rarely topped 9,000 copies, but the journal's reach vastly exceeded its grasp. Whether or not they always read Poetry, nearly every American poet who mattered in this century submitted manuscripts to it.

Pressing 65 years' worth of such contributions between the covers of a single anthology ought to produce something like essence of attar. It does not, as former Poetry Editor Daryl Hine admits in his introduction: "Much of what has appeared in Poetry, early and late, is mediocre, and seems more so today." Aside from "Prufrock," the magazine published only one other great poem: Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," which survived even Harriet Monroe's rather highhanded editing and rearranging of its stanzas. But the value of The "Poetry" Anthology does not rest on its Parnassian heights. Flipping through its pages is like watching time-lapse photography of American literary taste.

Ezra Pound was one of the magazine's first contributors. Within a few years (and a few pages) a lot of poets are sounding like Pound. The muse seems hardly to notice World War I; the next conflagration receives extended attention from writers as diverse as Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro and Robinson Jeffers. Teacher-poets appear in the '30s and '40s: R.P. Blackmur, William Empson, Allen Tate. A generation later is heard the dry academic rustle of those they taught.

Harriet Monroe's decision simply to print poems she thought were good created a magazine filled with contrasting voices. She published the tub thumping of Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay and the treacle of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She also discovered or encouraged unknowns whose ultimate reputations few could have guessed: Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore. She gave space to Robert Frost long before he became the panjandrum of U.S. poetry. By and large, successive editors followed Monroe's lead and kept their tastes as catholic as possible, although Henry Rago, who served from 1955 to 1969, managed to ignore the Beat Generation poets. Those who comb this anthology for Allen Ginsberg will thus be disappointed. But the book offers the pleasure of seeing plenty of other familiar faces, as if for the first time. Ave, Lowell! Hi there, Berryman! Welcome aboard, Ashbery!

The continuity of American poetry has depended on a succession of such faces and places where they can appear. In the Mayfly world of little magazines, a run of ten years is considered an epoch. Poetry's longevity is epic. Readers of this anthology can be depressed that more of Poetry's poems were not deathless. They can also be grateful to the magazine that let them live. --Paul Gray

The "Poetry" Anthology: 1912-1977 is not the epitaph that its hyphenated years suggest. Harriet Monroe's monthly still exists with its same old problems and a new editor. John Frederick Nims, 64, took the post in January. A poet, translator and the compiler of Western Wind, a witty and informative anthology for students, Nims runs his shop with a puckish sense of humor that he and it sorely need. "I took this job because I thought it would be fun," he says. He still professes to think so, despite a $20,000 deficit, increasing postal and printing costs, a circulation that has dwindled from 9,000 in the late '60s to 6,800 now, and a rising tide of manuscripts that last year exceeded 60,000. After the recent Labor Day weekend, Nims and his staff of three returned to the aging Chicago apartment house where Poetry lives and found a stack of mailed-in poems 18 inches thick.

Sorting through such piles is tedious business, but someone has to do it. From them come the 200 or so pieces that the magazine runs each year. Similarly unpromising batches of envelopes once yielded up Wallace Stevens, after all, and Nims keeps a special watch for the work of new or unknown writers. He admits to a double standard that reverses the one usually found in publishing: "We're demanding of established poets but fairly indulgent with the young."

He also notes that the magazine's hand-to-mouth existence stems from an anomaly: "We have more would-be writers than readers." Nims echoes other poetry editors in suggesting that a larger audience than the one being tapped must exist somewhere. He wonders in jest whether the techniques employed in computer dating might be used to prove him right: "There are always people who want to get married; the problem is getting them together." Poetry lovers, however, have never been numerous or of the marrying kind. They have kept the old girl going with monthly allowances, but denied her an annuity. qed

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