Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry

Poetry (magazine)

Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...

Magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, H. D., T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...

 and others, she played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Because she was a long time correspondent of the poets she supported, her letters provide a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.

Biography

She was born in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

, graduated from the Visitation Academy of Georgetown, D.C., in 1879, and afterward devoted herself to literary work. She died in Arequipa

Arequipa

Arequipa is the capital city of the Arequipa Region in southern Peru. With a population of 836,859 it is the second most populous city of the country...

, Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

.

Monroe was a member of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony

Eagle's Nest Art Colony

The Eagle's Nest Art Colony, the site known in more modern times as the Lorado Taft Field Campus, was founded in 1898 by American sculptor Lorado Taft on the bluffs flanking the east bank of the Rock River, overlooking Oregon, Illinois...

 in Ogle County, Illinois

Ogle County, Illinois

Ogle County is a county located in the U.S. state of Illinois. According to the 2010 census, it has a population of 53,497, which is an increase of 4.8% from 51,032 in 2000. Its county seat is Oregon, and its largest city is Rochelle...

, and is mentioned in Erik Larson

Erik Larson

Erik Larson is an American author. He has written Isaac's Storm , about the experiences of Isaac Cline during the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America , about the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of...

's The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 non-fiction book by Erik Larson presented in a novelistic style. The book is based on real characters and events. Leonardo DiCaprio purchased the film rights in 2010.The book is set in Chicago circa...

.

Works

• cantata for the opening of the Chicago Auditorium (1889)
• Columbian Ode composed for the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition
  World's Columbian Exposition
  The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...
  
  , with George Whitefield Chadwick (1892)
• Valeria and other Poems (1892)
• John Wellborn Root; A Study of His Life and Work (1896)
• The Passing Show - Five Modern Plays in Verse (1903)
• Dance of the Seasons (1911)
• You and I - Poems (1914)
• The New Poetry: Anthology of 20th Century Verse (1923)
• Poets And Their Art (1926)
• A Poet's Life - Seventy Years in a Changing World (1938)

External links

• Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Magazine
• Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at The Modernist Journals Project (searchable digital edition from October 1912 to December 1922)
• Harriet Monroe Memorabilia at the Newberry Library

, The New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1917, full text, at Google books

• 2 short radio episodes Mountain Hemlock and The Water Ouzel by Harriet Monroe from California Legacy Project
  California Legacy Project
  The California Legacy Project began in 2000 as a project at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, CA and later partnered with Heyday Books in Berkeley, CA. The project uses a research team of SCU interns to create radio scripts for the radio anthology "Your California Legacy" on KAZU 90.3 FM,...
  
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