Poetry (magazine)

Founding and editorial policy , founder and first editor of Poetry Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, a poet, critic, and arts writer who wanted a magazine devoted specifically to contemporary poetry.Literary scholar Ann Massa described the plan as "a bold project, if not an unlikely one", noting that the U.S. had not had a journal devoted solely to the publication and criticism of poetry and that Chicago had a reputation as difficult ground for little magazines. The magazine's motto, taken from Walt Whitman, was "to have great poets there must be great audiences too". The following month, Monroe wrote that "The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine" and said the editors hoped to avoid "entangling alliances with any single class or school". In a later printed appeal to poets, Monroe described the magazine as offering writers "a chance to be heard in their own place", outside the constraints of popular magazines. Its first issue included poems by Ezra Pound, Helen Dudley, William Vaughn Moody, Arthur Davison Ficke, Grace Hazard Conkling, and Emilia Stuart Lorimer, as well as Monroe's editorial comment "The Motive of the Magazine". Pound later served as the magazine's foreign correspondent, helping connect Monroe's Chicago-based publication to transatlantic literary networks. The magazine also published early or important work by writers including H.D., Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore. Later mid-century editors included Carruth, Karl Shapiro, and Henry Rago. Monroe had presented her poetry library, personal papers, and the magazine's editorial files to the University of Chicago in 1931. After her death, the materials helped form the Harriet Monroe Library of Modern Poetry and became part of the university's archival holdings on Poetry and twentieth-century verse. Additional records from the magazine's later history, including editorial correspondence, business files, issue proofs, author payment records, and publication files, are held by Indiana University's Lilly Library. ==Ruth Lilly bequest and Poetry Foundation era==

In 2002, Ruth Lilly, an heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, gave $100 million to the Modern Poetry Association, then the publisher of Poetry. Print and digital archive Poetry is published in print and online. In 2020, Book Riot wrote that the magazine's entire archive was available online at no cost, and that print back issues could be purchased. The foundation describes its own digital archive as containing more than 1,200 issues. The magazine receives more than 100,000 poems annually and response times can be up to one year; in a 2023 interview with The Millions, editor Adrian Matejka said the magazine received about 12,000 submitted poems per month. Poets & Writers described Poetry and The New Yorker as prestigious poetry markets with "vanishingly small acceptance rates", while Book Riot cited Poetrys high submission volume in describing it as one of the hardest poetry magazines to publish in. In a 2022 interview with Newcity, Matejka said he wanted the editorial process to involve "an actual conversation" and said poems were read multiple times, including aloud in editorial meetings; Michelle T. Boone said the organization was changing "the rotation of who's reading" and making room for more people to read, interpret, and recommend work for publication. Matejka told The Millions in 2023 that the magazine had limited poets to one appearance per year and aimed for half of each issue to feature poets new to Poetry. An open letter signed by more than 1,000 poets and supporters criticized the foundation's initial statement as vague and lacking "any commitment to concrete action" and said contributors would withhold work from Poetry. The foundation and magazine staff later issued an open letter apologizing for "silence in the face of crisis" and pledging changes that included an equity audit of foundation policies and practices. Later that month, the editors of Poetry apologized for publishing Michael Dickman's poem "Scholls Ferry Rd." in the July/August 2020 issue, saying that the poem contained racist language and that publishing it "was a mistake". The same day, the foundation announced that editor Don Share would step aside. In a subsequent editor's note, Share wrote that he accepted "sole responsibility" for publishing the poem and said his departure would be part of a restructuring of the magazine's editorial process. 2023–2024 boycott and resolution In November 2023, more than 2,000 poets, writers, and editors pledged to boycott the Poetry Foundation and Poetry after the magazine did not publish a review of Sam Sax's poetry collection PIG. The review was later published in The Poetry Project Newsletter, where its author wrote that it had originally been commissioned by the foundation and that an editor told him on October 8, 2023, that publication would be delayed. The boycott’s organizers said it responded to a “recent instance of prejudiced silencing” and the “censoring of anti-Zionist Jewish writers”. The boycott ended in March 2024. The foundation said the boycott had been lifted after discussions with organizers, and Publishers Weekly reported that organizers had lifted the boycott, which it described as having begun over the organization's "silence on the war in Gaza". ==Awards and recognition==

Poetry has received several National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2011, the magazine won General Excellence, Print, in the Literary, Political and Professional Magazines category. The Poetry magazine podcast also won a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in the Podcasting category that year. In 2020, John Lee Clark's essay "Tactile Art", published in the magazine's October 2019 issue, won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. ==Legacy and influence==

Poetry has been treated by scholars and reference works as a central periodical in the development of modern English-language poetry, literary modernism, and the little-magazine movement. The magazine's early role has also been examined through its format, editorial policy, and place in modernist print culture. Bartholomew Brinkman argues that the design and presentation of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse helped shape how modern poetry was read, separating poetry from popular verse and presenting the poem as an aesthetic object on the page. In a later study of Chicago literary culture, Brinkman wrote that Poetry and The Little Review were instrumental in promoting the Chicago literary renaissance and Chicago modernism. The magazine's archives have also been treated as a major record of twentieth-century poetry. The University of Chicago Library states that the magazine's records document, among other things, the development of English-language verse in the first half of the twentieth century. ==See also==

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