Poetry magazine has always operated on a shoe-string, so when a lawyer telephoned editor-in-chief Joseph Parisi, he told him to sit down before he gave him the news - that a wealthy heiress had bequeathed $100 million to the tiny publication.
The award, from Ruth Lilly, (87), the ailing inheritor of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, has transformed Poetry from a struggling Chicago-based literary journal into the richest poetry foundation in the world. The staff of four were stunned.
"There's a Dickensian element to all of this," said senior editor Stephen Young, speaking from his cramped offices in Chicago's Newberry Library.
"We've never even met her, all the dealings have been through her lawyer". In fact, he said, Poetry rejected verses submitted by Ms Lilly in the 1970s, but "it seems not to have bothered her".
Founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, Poetry claims to be the oldest and most distinguished magazine of verse in the world. It has a circulation of only 10,000 but receives 90,000 submissions a year from 45 countries, every one of which Mr Young reads. Of these, only 300 to 500 are published. Poetry has included many Irish poets over the years. It first published Seamus Heaney in 1972 and recently brought out a special Irish double-issue featuring 37 Irish poets in Gaelic and English, with an overview of the Irish literary scene by poet and critic Dennis O'Driscoll. It has also published in its time, and rejected, poems from William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and is credited with promoting Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.
The bequest from Ruth Lilly, already known to poets for her annual $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, will enable the journal to increase its staff, find new headquarters, improve production, and broaden its educational programme, said Mr Young. It may also improve on its modest $2 a line paid to all poets, whether or Nobel laureates or students.
Mr Thomas Ewbank, Ruth Lilly's lawyer, said his client was not offended by the magazine's polite rejections, many written by Mr Parisi, who announced the award at a quiet dinner for the arts community in Chicago on Friday. Judging poetry on its merits, and not on the author, may have had something to do with the gift, said Mr Parisi, as it meant the journal was responsible and discerning.
Poetry was always the "poor little match girl of the arts," said US poet laureate Billy Collins. "Well, the poor little match girl just hit the lottery."