POETRY JOURNAL: The name of the magazine says it all. Poetry. Not even Poetry (Chicago). If any journal deserves to be entrusted with the domain name for the art, it must be this resilient Chicago-based monthly, founded in 1912 by the 50-year-old Harriet Monroe ("failed playwright, obscure poet, struggling freelance writer") as an outlet for the longer and more progressive poems which rarely found editorial favour at the time.
Last November, during a dinner to mark the 90th anniversary of the often impoverished magazine, it was announced that Poetry was being endowed with over $100 million by the pharmaceuticals heiress Ruth Lilly. The tremor from this enlightened but improbable windfall registered far beyond the small world of poetry and made headlines across the globe, including a front-page splash in The Irish Times.
Whether or not pork was on the menu for Poetry's $100 million dinner, it played a part in the history of the magazine. Carl Sandburg, one of Harriet Monroe's discoveries, famously depicted Chicago as the "Hog Butcher for the World"; and the idea that a sophisticated poetry periodical might emanate from the city of stockyards and meat-packing plants induced ribbing of the "Poetry in Porkopolis" kind from headline-writers. Ezra Pound, Monroe's irascible "Foreign Correspondent" and indefatigable talent scout, was impressed by her ability to persuade some Chicago businessmen to become the initial patrons of Poetry: "You ought to leave as durable and continuing a monument as possible to the fact that you extracted from among the porkpackers a few less constipated and made them pay money for the upkeep of poesy. The five just men in Sodom were as nothing in comparison".
Dear Editor, which surveys the half-century from 1912 to 1962, documents Poetry's centrality to 20th-century literature by means of a fascinating rummage, conducted by Joseph Parisi (editor of Poetry for the past 20 years) and Stephen Young (Poetry's senior editor), through the magazine's archive of letters. Supplemented by Parisi with vivid biographical sketches and lively commentaries - solid stepping stones between the epistolary outpourings - Dear Editor begins by charting the great surge of Modernism during which Poetry published "the earliest important work" of "several then-unknown, now-classic authors" including Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. And it was Poetry's readers too who first glimpsed works as seminal as Yeats's 'A Prayer for My Daughter' and 'The Fisherman', as well as war poems as contrasting as Rupert Brooke's rhetorical icon 'The Soldier' ("If I should die, think only this of me.") and Isaac Rosenberg's realist masterpiece 'Break of Day in the Trenches' (submitted from the Western Front in 1916 on poignant "scraps of dirty paper").
While Eliot's first published poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, needed to be wafted in Poetry's direction with plenty of Poundian puffing and blowing on its behalf, Harriet Monroe spotted Wallace Stevens's idiosyncratic talent for herself, setting him on the path to fame if not fortune ("My royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to $6.70"). The London-based Ezra Pound, whose early pronouncements on poetry were as laudable as his later pronouncements on politics were lamentable, identified Eliot in 1915 as a "young chap" who would "go quite a long way". Two years previously, Pound - who constantly goaded Monroe to be less cautious in her judgements - had astutely recommended Robert Frost ("Vurry Amur'k'n, with, I think, the seeds of grace").
Joseph Parisi candidly acknowledges that "Like every other literary journal, Poetry devoted much space over the years to works that proved ephemeral. Ironically, the correspondence about these poems sometimes holds more lasting interest." Many of the once-celebrated and award-encrusted poets whose letters feature in Dear Editor are now largely forgotten, their books pulped, their graves ungarlanded, their appreciation societies disbanded. During her 24 years at the helm of Poetry, Harriet Monroe - for whom a wartime supply ship was later named - calmly floated through the choppiest disputes, whether involving minor or major poets. A woman of equable, generous and sympathetic character, she was (after her death in 1936) the subject of a reminiscence by Wallace Stevens who noted that "Her job brought Miss Monroe into contact with the most ferocious egotists. I mean poets in general".
Among the many poetic contenders for the role of Egotist of the 20th Century, the condescending, calculating, cigar-smoking Imagist poet Amy Lowell emerges as a frontrunner. And Monroe's harried successor, George Dillon, clearly relished the task of adding this final flourish in a letter to the odious, egregious and exasperating Oscar Williams (a "perennial pest"): "Although I like the enclosed poems, it is a pleasure to be able to return them as you request, to cancel your subscription, and to bring our correspondence to an end".
Poetry's finances were permanently precarious; yet the magazine never missed an issue and Dear Editor records the success of its later editors (including Peter DeVries, Karl Shapiro and Henry Rago) in publishing poets as diversely distinguished as Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Frank O'Hara and Sylvia Plath.
Ready cash, essential though it is when contributors are cadging loans and clamouring for advance payments, is less important to a magazine than some compelling editorial vision and passion; a sense of mission is something Poetry has never lacked. Vibrant, eclectic and independent of all coteries, it still reaches out to a general readership and remains faithful to Harriet Monroe's promise to avoid "entangling alliances with any single class or school". Happily, now that Ruth Lilly has emptied her $100 million piggybank for the benefit of Poetry, "Porkopolis" can be even more confident of an epic future for its prestigious poetry journal. In poetry at least, hogs sometimes fly.
Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters.
The First Fifty Years, 1912-1962
Edited and compiled by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young
W.W. Norton, 473 pp. £32
• Dennis O'Driscoll's latest books are Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings (Gallery) and the poetry collection Exemplary Damages (Anvil)