Editor's Bequest

In 1911 a frail, 51-year-old Chicago poetess named Harriet Monroe persuaded 100 citizens to give $50 annually for a poetry magazine. Before her death last year she had kept Poetry in first place among U. S. poetry magazines for 25 years, exercised a powerful influence in literary movements, launched a score of new writers, written an autobiography scheduled for publication this spring. Last week in Chicago, the Renaissance Society opened an exhibition of the editorial papers she left to the University of Chicago. Largely made up of matters of historical interest--letters and manuscripts of Robert Frost, James Joyce, Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, such items as a letter containing a check to Rupert Brooke for one of his war sonnets, returned marked deceased--the exhibition was notable for its revelation of the number of first-class writers Harriet Monroe had discovered. To U. S. readers Poetry introduced Yeats, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Rupert Brooke when they had only small reputations abroad, brought out poets of the stature of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Vachel Lindsay, who had never published anywhere until Poetry gave them an outlet.

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