çPARA PAR@ ` TEXT ` ±Monroe, Harriet1860╨1936editor and poetBorn in Chicago on December 23, 1860, Harriet Monroe was educated at the Dearborn Seminary in Chicago and the Convent of the Visitation in Georgetown, D.C., graduating from the latter in 1879. During the next decade her ambition to become a dramatist and a poet was encouraged by such literary figures as Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom she corresponded, William Dean Howells, Eugene Field, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Richard Watson Gilder. In 1888 Gilder accepted her sonnet ╥With Shelley╒s Poems╙ for his Century magazine, and in the same year she was commissioned to write a cantata for the dedication of Louis Sullivan╒s Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. In 1891 she published Valeria and Other Poems. That same year she received a $1000 commission to write a ╥Columbian Ode╙ for the opening of the World╒s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in October 1892. Thereafter a recognized poet, she continued to publish verse in national magazines while also serving as art and drama critic for Chicago newspapers. In 1896 she wrote John Wellborn Root, Architect, a memoir of her late brother-in-law, and in 1900 another volume of verse, After All. The Passing Show: Five Modern Plays in Verse was published in 1903, but none of the plays was performed. The Dance of the Seasons appeared in 1911. Monroe would likely have remained only a minor figure but for her ambitious project to establish a forum for contemporary poets. With the confidence born of a sure critical eye she found backers and solicited work from more than 50 poets, and after a year and a half of planning and fund-raising Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was launched in October 1912. Young new writers were drawn to the magazine, and it quickly became the leading poetry journal in the English-speaking world. A list of its contributors, beginning with Ezra Pound (who served as London editor for the magazine╒s first six years) and including Marianne Moore, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, became an index of major contemporary poets, many of whom were first brought to public attention through its pages. Although Monroe, under whose aegis the magazine thrived for 24 years, championed the Imagists, the magazine did not confine itself to any school. Her passion for open-mindedness and innovation remained its ruling credo. The magazine survived the passing of the Chicago Renaissance, in the midst of which it had been born, as well as world war and world depression, to remain a journal of major importance. Her own writing over this period included two volumes of verse, You and I, 1914, and The Difference and Other Poems, 1924. Poets and Their Art, 1926, contained essays and a selection of her editorials, and in 1935 she issued a volume of her Chosen Poems. In 1917 she edited with Alice Henderson (the magazine╒s assistant editor) the influential The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English. It was revised and reissued in 1923 and 1932. She died in Arequipa, Peru, on September 26, 1936. Her autobiography, A Poet╒s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World, appeared in 1938. .styl ` ( ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ + !I δ 5¬ ∞ !I . !I 5 !I ┌ !I ± !I 8 !I U !I í !I ╪ !I !I - !I B 5¬ C !I l !I ç !I ½ !I ▐ ╣ !I π !I ▐ φ !I @ !I ▐ O !I ² 5¬ ■ !I
╫ !I
α !I
∞ !I
!I !I & !I ë !I ò !I ≥ !I 4 !I ¡ !I ▌ !I >link ` HYPR ½ ╣HYPR π φHYPR @ O
