Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs

"The Columbian Ode" and Poetry, y\ Magazine of Verse \ Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs

ANN MASSA

In 1911, at the age of fifty-one, Harriet Monroe of Chicago decided to seek in that city sponsorship for a magazine devoted solely to the publication and criticism of poetry. It was a bold project, if not an unlikely one. America had never had such a journal. Chicago had a reputation as the graveyard of little magazines. There appeared to be scant supply of good new poetry and less demand. Moreover, it was doubtful that Chicago's intermittent patronage of the arts could be diverted from the publicly prestigious forums of the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony.1 How and why, then, did Harriet Monroe succeed? Aficionados of Chicago might argue the logic of the Chicago Renaissance: that as journalism and fiction took on fresh life in Chicago at the turn of the century, poetry and drama — the Little Theater movement did originate in Chicago — would follow suit. Harriet Monroe was to argue that poetry made its own case, irresistibly. Most important, however, was Harriet Monroe herself: her temperament and her experience, her status and her image. In 1911 she •was a woman of some achievement: a minor poet and playwright, a distinguished essayist and journalist, an individual always

1 Arguably, Poetry had a special place in Chicago patronage, though it is virtually ignored in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, Ky., 1976). For, as Nelson Algren has pointed out, practically all Chicago's manifestations of interest in culture have had a question mark hanging over them. "The city's arts are built upon the uneasy consciences that milked the city of millions in the grain exchanges, in traction and utilities and sausage stuffing and then bought conscience ease with a minute fraction of the profits. A museum for a traction system, an opera building for a utilities empire." Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (Chicago, 1951), p. 82. But Monroe's Poetry was such a small venture that it made no sense for sponsors to see it as a sop to conscience, a means to prestige. To sponsor Poetry implied a belief in art for art's sake or a belief in Harriet Monroe. Ann Massa is Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT. Journal of American Studies, 20 (1986), 1, 51—70 Printed in Great Britain

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 5 2 Jinn Massa at the centre of cultural life. She was part of the Critic and Century circles in New York in the 1880s and 1890s; part of Robert Louis Stevenson's circle; Bernard Berenson's; Louis Sullivan's and Frank Lloyd Wright's. In Chicago she had been well known since 1892, when, at the opening ceremonies of Dedication Day at the Chicago World's Fair, extracts from her "Columbian Ode" were performed. Parts of it were recited by Sarah Cowell Le Moync, a popular elocutionist; parts of it had been set to music by the Boston composer George Chadwick, later Director of the New England Conservatory; massed choirs and the Chicago Symphony were marshalled under the baton of the eminent Theodore Thomas. The events surrounding the commissioning and the performance of the ode demonstrated a striking mixture of idealistic theory and businesslike practice which, in 1911, enabled Harriet Monroe to contemplate and to secure the financial backing essential to the founding and the survival of Poetry. It was during the struggle for the Ode that she learned and showed her winning qualities: determination, entrepreneurial flair, a commitment to Chicago's culture and the ability to enhance it. Then, and again in 1911, she was able to sell her sponsors two products: poetry and herself. When Congress awarded Chicago the staging of the 1892 World's Fair, Harriet Monroe anxiously noted that East Coast newspapers predicted a "cattle-show" in the "porkopolis."2 It was partly because she too feared for the international image of American culture that she decided to demonstrate that Chicago was sufficiently cultivated to want a poem as part of the Fair's opening ceremonies; it was also because she was concerned for America's image of literature in Chicago and particularly because she was eager to seize the chance to do something for two things she cared about greatly: poetry and her home town. Additionally, she felt that if she " struck for Chicago," and if her contribution " proved a success, it would give me a certain standing in my profession, paralleling perhaps that of a young sculptor who gets a well-praised statue into a prominent place, or that of a young painter whose picture draws a conspicuous prize or is bought for the Luxembourg."3 She was already a figure of some note in the city as the daughter of a well-known lawyer; more so for her work on the Chicago Tribune, first as its New York arts correspondent (Nov. 1888—Feb. 1889) and second as its art critic (Oct. 1890—June 1891). Her

2 Harriet Monroe, John Wellborn Root (Boston, 1896), p. z 18 ; Francis W. Ledercr II, " The Genesis of the World's Columbian Exposition" (Master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1967). 3 Harriet Monroe, "Biography" [1917], Harriet Monroe Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 5 } poetry and plays had at that time, a private circulation only. It was, then, a small power base, and indeed, far from her commission for a poem originating with the Fair's authorities, she herself had to sell the idea. In the early 1930s, when she was writing about the Ode in her autobiography, ^4 Poe/'s Life, she had temporarily mislaid the relevant papers — minutes, clippings, her own letters of the period: one of a number of reasons why her account of the affair shows some inaccuracies. Explicable inaccuracies, however. To a retrospective Harriet Monroe, champion and defender of poetry for so many years, it seemed that her campaign had begun with the shock of the news that no poem was scheduled as part of the opening ceremonies. She now saw herself as the young hopeful who had believed that her " Auditorium Cantata," performed to music at the opening of Louis Sullivan's building in 1889, had established poetry and her poetry as a distinctive part of public life in Chicago. Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why, in fact, she had begun to write the Ode in October 1890, one month after Congress had decided the Fair should be held in Chicago and long before the shape of the ceremonies had been even provisionally sketched out. Her egotism was complemented by a campaign that was both bold and prudent. By February 1891 she had broached the question of the Ode with Daniel Burnham, Chief of Construction for the Fair, and a man with clout in all the Fair's committees. (His partner, John Root, was Harriet Monroe's brother-in-law.) Later that month, Burnham sent on to Harriet Monroe a letter he had received from one of the Fair's organizers, reaper-millionaire Cyrus McCormick, Jr. Burnham's covering note ran: "My dear Miss Harriet: The enclosed letter will explain itself. The matter seems to be going as you desire." McCormick had written:

In reply to your note of the 14th, I am glad to have your recommendation of Miss Harriet Monroe as one who is competent to undertake the writing of a poem in connection with the opening ceremonies of the World's Fair The proposal of a poem of this kind [epic? Columbian?] would appear to have a fitting place in the dedication ceremonies.4 Harriet was not satisfied with one influential spokesman, and she canvassed three wealthy acquaintances on the sixteen-member Committee of Cere- monies. Her description of the three in her autobiography reflects the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Chicago's businessmen, many of whom she had met during her time on the Tribune. 4 Harriet Monroe, s\ Poet's Life (New York, 1958), pp. 116—17; McCormick to Burnham, 26 Feb. 1891; Burnham to Monroe, 28 Feb. 1891, Burnham Papers, Art Institute of Chicago.

She found them intriguing people; she believed them to be individually susceptible to culture and not disinclined to assume a role of cultural responsibility. And indeed, not one of these financiers, with their varying attitude to art, was unreceptive to Harriet's suggestion that an ode to Columbus/Columbia should be included in the opening ceremonies and that she should write it. Perhaps they were sensitive about Chicago's image; perhaps they responded to something in her akin to the drive and determination that had brought them to the top in Chicago. At any rate, Yerkes, perhaps the most philistine of the three, volunteered to put her case persuasively to the whole Committee, and on 6 March 1891 a notification arrived from E. C. Culp, secretary to the Committee, "that Miss Harriet Monroe be requested to write a poem, to be delivered at some time during the dedicatory exercises, the same to be submitted to the Committee for approval, or otherwise." Culp, who liked Harriet, and often forewarned her of likely moves by the Committee, told her informally at this time that owing to heated competition among arts and artists for representation at the opening ceremonies, she should be prepared for a request to have her Ode set to music and performed by a choir; and at a meeting on 11 July 1891 the Committee cut out a cantata and authorized a musical setting for Harriet's Ode. On 3 1 October she was asked to submit a draft of the Ode to the Committee and on 3 November she read the entire Ode to them. The response was excellent. The same day Culp wrote her:

5 Poet's Life, p. 117. A passage from one of Monroe's short stories, "On the Way to the Golf Links," [1917], Harriet Monroe Papers, demonstrates her continuing interest in "solid men...middle aged men... the big burly males I see in a city crowd leaning eagerly over the bargain-counter, trying to get the most they can of civilization for their money, the best they can of wives and children, houses and lands, of power to buy happiness and achieve the beauty of the world. Money, power, power obvious and immediate... can be comfort and happiness... splendor and glory... can beckon genius to its service."

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 5 5 " while I am not on the Committee in a voting capacity I desire to express the pleasure I felt in hearing you read the ode. I believe you will produce a work worthy of the event to be commemorated." Ellsworth too found the Ode "beautiful in spirit and sentiment" and awaited "the opportunity to peruse the poem when fully completed."6 There were, however, problems. Not only Ellsworth, who was rightly reserving final judgment, but the Committee as a whole was initially astonished at the poet's audacious attempt to extract maximum profit for herself from the Ode with a belligerence which was not, at this stage, helping her. The first evidence of dissatisfaction had come when she had shown herself reluctant to allow George Chadwick, the collaborating composer, to print portions of the Ode in the score for choir practice without paying her royalties. It required the intervention of the Fair's choral director, William Tomlins, to put her politely in her place: " I think it is not usual to exact royalty especially when but a small portion of a poem is used." Next, Harriet asked the Committee to pay her for an ode, which, she reminded them, they had "invited" her to write; and though a resolution to that effect had been passed the Committee was aware that the suggestion had initially come from her. Hers was an aggressive, literal, disconcertingly businesslike presentation of their agreement (a presentation preserved in A. Poet's Life, where she headed a chapter "The Columbian Ode: a Commission"). On 18 May 1893 she wrote to Chairman Lawrence respectfully requesting "that the Committee on Ceremonies grant me proper remuneration for the service, viz:- one thousand dollars in addition to copyright.7" One factor not mentioned in Harriet's letter to Chairman Lawrence was that the Committee had reserved the right finally to accept or reject the Ode on the basis of expert advice — a right which she apparently never expected to be exercised — and also on the basis of its own judgment. She was not averse to criticism or collaboration — provided it came from her peers. She happily discussed with Chad-wick himself, and with Theodore Thomas who had conducted her Auditorium Cantata, which stanzas to set to music and how best to alter vowels to match pitch. On 23 March Culp had notified her that the Committee had authorized an expert's review of the Ode. The expert was William Morton Payne, editor of The Dial, and she certainly profited from the review, adopting most of Payne's suggestions

6 Poet's Life, p. 118 ; Culp to Monroe, 6 Mar., 11 July 1891; Ellsworth to Monroe, Nov. 1891, Harriet Monroe Papers. 1 Tomlins to Monroe, 17 Apr. 1892; Monroe to Lawrence, 18 May 1892, Harriet Monroe Papers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 56 Ann Massa for tightening and clarifying the poem.8 But to debate the ode with a committee of amateurs was unacceptable. Her stance was too much for some members of the Committee. If they were enlightened enough to see the need for a poem, were they not also enlightened enough to judge it? If Harriet Monroe was acting with an alienating assertiveness, it must be said in her defence that the sixteen-man committee made an unwieldy editorial board, whose members employed different criteria and offered impossibly contradictory objections: too short, too long, too classical, outrageously modern.9 But Harriet had done little to endear herself to the Committee; and it was not surprising that on 21 September the Tribune ran a headline: "To Sacrifice the Ode. It may not be read during the exercises," explaining that the unsatisfactory acoustics of the open-air stage would prevent four-fifths of the 125,000 audience from hearing the 20,000 •words of the Ode (its real length was 2,200), that the ceremonies as planned would last five hours, and stating that since "Miss Harriet Monroe has been paid $1,000 for her work... members of the Committee think that as the poem is theirs for that occasion they may make such disposition of it as seems best."10 The Council of Administration was to take its decision the next day. Harriet, who was present, re-lived the meeting in a long letter to her sisters, and admitted to encountering widespread hostility. In her autobiographical account, however, the source of the hostility was dramatically identified as an inexplicably changed Ellsworth, "the little upstart," and his slanderous allegation that too much of the poem was a panegyric to Harriet's brother-in-law John Root, the imaginative Chief Consulting Architect of the Fair, who had recently died. In fact, Ellsworth seemed simply to have felt that a more distanced poem by a more established poet, Whittier, perhaps, was called for. But Harriet Monroe ignored the general thrust of his argument, and made emotional capital out of his "slights."

8 Chadwick to Monroe, 12 May 1892; William Morton Payne, " Suggestions in Reference to Miss Monroe's 'Columbian Ode,"' 18 Mar. 1892, Harriet Monroe Papers. Her presentation in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 57 When he "made malignant representation of the poem... raised a point against the four lines about John... [and] I explained my reason for them and read the passage in which they occur, at once surprise ran round the circle and the general exclamation 'Is that all? there are only four lines '" Ellsworth had almost certainly made the mistake that many made when they read the poem, and had taken a lengthy passage about George Washington, unnamed, to refer to Root, also unnamed. The confusion was understandable, given the vagueness of Harriet's allegory and her public emphasis on the poem as a tribute to Root. Washington was described as Hero of our younger race Strong builder of a temple new and Harriet wrote of Root: Back with the old glad smile comes one we knew, We bade him rear our house of joy today; But Beauty opened wide her upward way And he passed on.11 The sudden collapse of the opposition is difficult to explain. According to Harriet" the thing that won them thank heaven! •was the poem! " — but perhaps her emotional recitation and her powerful and pretty person had something to do with it. The middle-aged gallants of the Committee rallied round her -with extravagant sympathy and compliments. Harlow Niles Higinbotham, one of the Chicago businessmen on the Committee, who did not know of my relationship to John, said that if he had casually taken up a poem for this occasion the first thing he would look for in it — the thing he would have been disappointed not to find — would have been some recognition of that great man Root. George Massey "confessed deep emotion over the lines." Harriet herself "consented to the cutting of the poem for delivery provided it be printed as written." If she made the concession with as much arrogance as her words suggests, it was not surprising that once she had left the meeting her critics suggested. omitting the Ode from the program altogether in order to shorten it; and they got into such a wrangle over that that the next day they referred the whole question to the grand high cockalorum Council of Administration "for final settlement." Then we began an active campaign.12 11 Poet's Life, p. 120; Monroe to "Dear Sisters," 24 Sept. 1892, Harriet Monroe Papers. 12 Monroe to "Dear Sisters" Poet's Life, pp. 126—27.

I shall never forget that afternoon. The warmth and cordiality of it -were as balm to my wounded feelings.... "I wish I could be put out of the programme and have the whole poem read" said Mr Higinbotham [-whose biography she was to write, emphasizing as one of his career's highlights his role in saving the Ode]'... " Why," said another, " if I could write an ode like that I would go home and devote myself to that business for the rest of my life; it's bristling with jewels." We had a very good time and many pleasant things were said. And the next day the Council signed its formidable title to a box of -white roses and sent them to me.13

Although the poem was published in full in the official history of the Fair, only two sections, totalling twenty-eight lines, were authorized for performance, lines emphasizing the role of America as the custodian of "the Spirit of Freedom" and "the purpose of God." The performance

13 Margaret Sullivan to President and Council of Administration, 21 Sept. 1892 ; Burnham to Monroe, 22, 23 Sept. 1892 ; Monroe to " Dear Sisters "; Harriet Monroe, Harlow Niks Higinbotham (Chicago, 1928), pp. 26-32.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 59 was in comic contrast to the earnestness of Harriet Monroe's campaign: elocutionist and orchestra were placed too far apart to synchronize!14 After such a palaver the poem •would have had to be extraordinarily good not to be anti-climatic; it was not good at all. If Harriet had not consistently anthologized the poem it is doubtful if even the historical interest of association with the World's Fair and with her own role in shaping American poetry would have been sufficient to preserve the Ode's accessibility. In 1935, when she included it in her Chosen Poems, she singled out for praise its sincere optimism and its modernity. The Ode "did not go back to the heathen gods for its authority and none of its figures or symbols was derived from the classics." Perhaps an ageing memory was at fault; perhaps her image of herself as the priestess of modern poetry was powerfully present. For the Ode offered "cloud-veiled Titans" and "altar-fire" attendant on a nymph-goddess Columbia, who progressed from the "young austerity / Of hair unbounded and strong limbs bare and brown" to a prosperity which brought " robes most fair / And filleted her shining hair / And zoned her waist with jewels rare."15 From the opening line "Columbia, on thy brow are dewy flowers" (the American version of the laurel wreath, Harriet Monroe explained), the poem, which spanned American history from the discovery of Vinland to the revelation of Chicago, consistently used traditional styles and images. What was original was her effective championship of poetry in Chicago. And, retrospectively, if the winning of support for her poem is seen as a dry run for Poetry, the Ode was, in fact, the most significant literary event of the Fair. As Monroe had feared, the Literature Congress was unadventurous in its organization into four sessions on History, Philology, Folk Lore and Authors. The American section of the Authors Committee boasted the names of Stedman, Gilder, Aldrich, Cable, Howells, Warner and Norton; Harriet was one of eight ladies on the Women's Auxiliary Committee of the Congress. But few of the great Committee members attended the Congress itself. Harriet remembered it as:

a rather perfunctory affair, as no very brilliant literary lights found it convenient to come from afar at the designated moment to shine for us. Sir Walter Besant from England...(etc.) were no doubt disappointed not to meet Howells, James, Gilder, Mrs Burnett and other American confreres then effulgent.16 Somewhat drearily the Congress discussed "Literary Copyright," "The 11 Unidentified clipping, Harriet Monroe Papers. 15 Harriet Monroe, "Columbian Ode," Valeria and Other Poems (Chicago, 1892), pp. 220—34; Chosen Poems (New York, 1935), p. ix. 16 Harriet Monroe, "A Poet's Life," Draft I, p. 174, Harriet Monroe Papers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 60 Ann Massa Rights and Interests of Authors," " Literature for Children." Two sessions sounded promising "Aspects of Modern Fiction" and "Criticism and Literature" — but only two of the eighteen papers, John Burroughs on "The Excess of Art over Life in Recent Literature" and Joseph Kirkland on "The Ebb-tide in Realism," struck any sparks from native flint; and a Poet's Day could only muster insignificant live elocutionists reading from great dead writers. The Congress did little to compensate for the fact that displays of priting techniques used in Judge comics and the Elsie books, and one of Uncle Tom's Cabin in sixty languages made up American literature's exhibit at the fair; a poor showing when compared with the generous representation of America's leading contemporary sculptors and painters.17 There was, perhaps, some justification for Monroe's belief that in the context of the verbose opening ceremonies on 21 October 1 892, "my ode had a chance of longer life than any other word we had listened to; for no speaker had made the day his own forever, as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, by shaping the world's hope into a few sentences too beautiful to be forgotten."18 The campaign, the poem and its performance were capped by yet another curious and significant triumph for Monroe as the aggressive promoter and defender of poetry. The New York World'had thought there was sufficient interest in the Ode to get hold of a copy successfully and to publish it before the opening ceremony. Monroe sued for $5,000 damages and costs. She sued first because "premature publication took the edge of the grand occasion so that it fell flat." " It was written for a national and international occasion, the greatest festival in the nation's history, and the point of it was that it be first performed there" — she scribbled on a draft of her evidence — later revising the sentence to " a crime against the Exposition, in which every honest and patriotic man and woman in the country took pride. " Second, because "it laid me open to the charge of treachery to the Committee which had honored me by its invitation." Third, as a test case for other authors, on -whose behalf she should receive exemplary and punitive damages for infringement of copyright, not to mention her rights in personal property.19

17 Eve H. Brodlique, "In Literary Chicago," Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, 24 (Nov. 1892); the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Department of Literature, "Program of the Congress of Authors, 10 July 1893." 18 Poet's Life, pp. 130-31. 19 Ibid., p. 131; The Press Publishing Co. vs. Harriet Monroe, transcript of record. Argued before the Circuit Court, 19—30 Feb. 1896. Monroe's outraged comments scribbled on verso of proof copy of "Columbian Ode," Harriet Monroe Papers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 61 It was under the third head that she won her case; but not before she had effectively used the courtroom to defend the integrity of a poem and the art of poetry. The World had not done fairly by the Ode: leaving out some lines, truncating others, and running some together; reversing the order of stanzas, printing past tense for present and vice versa (a distortion of allegory, as was the happy-go-lucky printing of capital letters for small ones and vice versa.)20 Harriet Monroe also introduced evidence of her literary status and promise. Richard Watson Gilder was one of a number of eminent critics and writers who spoke up for her. " She has an excellent reputation as an authoress. She was known as a poetess, before the Ode was delivered and since. She has an excellent reputation among the younger poets of the country." Richard Henry Stoddard underwrote her literary standard by comparing himself with her. "If that poem had been written by Longfellow or Bryant or Whittier... it would command a much larger price than if it had been written by Richard Henry Stoddard or Miss Monroe." Edmund Clarence Stedman, "dean" of American poets, a good friend of Monroe's and president of the American Copyright Aid Society, testified to his belief in the current and future importance of her poetry.21 Just as it was something more than her social background, her civic pride, her known literary interests and her relationship to John Root that gave Harriet Monroe significant status and powerful advocates in Chicago, so there was something more than amused and benevolent patronage on the part of the literati. Their praise of her modest poetic talent was matched by their recognition of her arresting ability to translate a dream into reality. The Critic typified the envious, almost incredulous admiration aroused by the five-year saga of the Ode and its highly profitable conclusion. The poet is to be congratulated on the result of her suit, which establishes a most valuable copyright precedent. She is also to be congratulated on having, in all, $6,000 on account of a single poem, the original purchase price having been $ 1,000. If this is not the highest amount ever received for a poem of its length, it may at least be said that the World will have paid the highest price ever paid by a periodical for so short a production.22 The last act of the drama of the Ode was over. The whole production had been a highly effective public relations exercise for Monroe. She had defined, led and won her cause; she had acquired an image and a role in the world of American poetry. The concept and the campaign of the Ode

20 Transcript, p. 62; Critic, 21 (Oct. 1892), 185. 21 Transcript, pp. 47—50, 82, 15;. 22 Ibid., pp. 71 3, 77, 119; Critic, 25 (Oct. 1894), 276.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 62 Ann Massa had finally established a rapport between herself and the city's leaders, summed up in "I Will," Chicago's motto, adopted at the Fair. If she had in part been motivated to write the Ode because she feared Chicago was insufficiently cultured and about to be perceived as such, if she had been a little prickly about having her poetry judged by Chicago's businessmen, she was now convinced that she had been wrong. In 1893 she wrote a long, unpublished essay on "Chicago" in which she pictured herself as an integral, conditioned part of a city where, " among the women as -well as the men, one finds the same love of conquest, the same desire to attain the impossible, for nothing is impossible." She surveyed the city's history and read a great destiny in it. " Why should growing ambition fix upon a swamp for its seat of power?" she asked, and answered, because thus it was left to the heroic, the imaginative in the westward marching army of American youth, to become the founders of Chicago. The place has been called the very seat and centre of materialism — never was characterization more obtuse. The young men, wanderers from many states, who settled here during the thirties and forties, were inspired by an epic love of conquest. A nice distinction this between materialism and conquest, and one which she pursued. " The power which has been accumulated in resistance to material forces is now being expended for higher things." Monroe had now become an infatuated booster of Chicago ("even its most awkward manifestations show a certain buoyant vigor") and its businessmen, "daring dreamers." She posited an almost mystical relationship between person, place and culture. Something in the wide expanses of level lake and prairie — the infinite reaches of changing color touched only by the sky - touched brave imaginations with large desires and thrilled them with the creative impulse. And just as in more finished times this impulse manifests itself in art, in those days of struggle it manifested itself in gigantic works — in founding systems of law and government, in raising levels and reclaiming marshes.

Idealistically she affirmed a process -whereby individual speculation or creativity was inevitably directed toward the general cultural good. Chicago's men of affairs made "at first humble efforts to keep in touch with the world's thought." Books were collected, theatres and opera houses were built, literary societies founded. Gradually, appreciation ceased to be a matter of individual taste and became a public duty. Such a practical theory of culture could not help but recommend Harriet Monroe to the leading citizens of Chicago. They liked to be told they were "magnificently competent."23

23 Harriet Monroe, "Chicago," pp. 4—5, 14, 16-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 63 There are some striking similarities and some interesting discrepancies between Monroe's marketing of the Ode and of Poetry. The terms in which she described the enterprises in her autobiography bear comparison. For the World's Fair, she wrote: The arts, backed by all the money in the -world, seemed to be conspiring together for a gala season.... The arts ? all the arts but one, for although music was to have a grand summer program under Theodore Thomas, poetry was omitted from all the plans. This seemed to me unjust and ill-advised. The Dedication would be incomplete without a poem, and I wanted to write it — indeed, I seemed to be the only available person in a city, then highly charged with atmosphere, where all the excitement of preparation was going on. What could be done about it? I reflected.24 And of the origins of Poetry: The Art Institute, with the arts which it officially represented and encouraged, was backed by a group of the most powerful and wealthy men and women in the city.... But why was poetry left out of it?... why -was there nothing done for poets?.... One reason, manifestly, -was that a poem cannot be exhibited and bought and possessed by some private or public collector in the manner of a painting or a statue. Gradually... I became convinced that something must be done; and since nobody else was doing anything it might be "up to me" to try to stir up the sluggish situation.25 Tn 1 891 her reflection led her to aggressive lobbying; not so, apparently, in 1911. But what could I do? what kind of protest would have any effect?... How to do it? Such a project needed money — how could I get it? any man rich enough to back it with cash would probably laugh at such a hare-brained project — my grievances would sound ridiculous to the typical hard-boiled businessman of my Middle Western metropolis.26 A number of reasons present themselves for this apparent loss of confidence in self and in city. First, Monroe was aware that what she was suggesting might well look like a bad risk, a poor investment, and an unnecessary enterprise. There was little in the way of new poetry or hungry audiences to point to. Chicago's reputation was not at stake it was now a thriving centre for fiction, theatre and journalism, for art and architecture. She could only ask potential guarantors to have faith in her faith. Second, it was not as easy as it had been in 1891 to make out a case for her own competence. The words she uses to describe her state of mind in 1911

24 Poet's Life, pp. 116—17. 25 Ibid., p. 242. a» Ibid., p. 245.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 64 Ann Massa demonstrate an exaggerated defensiveness. She •was almost assuming failure. Why? Because the Poetry project, far from being "hare-brained" and " ridiculous," -was a desperate last throw in her own career for a woman who saw less and less chance of achieving her ambition to be a great poet and/or playwright, a woman who wrote "I cannot remember the time when not to die without leaving some memorable record did not seem to me a calamity too terrible to be borne."27 Her achievements since the Ode had been insubstantial when set against these ambitions, though in themselves her achievements had been worthy. She had published a volume of poetry, Valeria and Other Poems (1892) and one of plays, The Passing Show (1903); she had seen two of her plays produced in Chicago. She had written some fine essays from Europe for the Atlantic and first-rate art criticism for the Chicago Tribune. But she was increasingly frustrated at rarely being able to find outlets for that part of writing which came to engage her most, poetry, and in particular, her experimental free verse. Existing magazines only wanted fillers. Sight of Pound's Personae and Exultations in London in 1910 impelled her to action. She was outraged that an American poet of such promise was not published at home; she was encouraged to believe there were other Pounds and Monroes struggling for publication. But she would have to do the publishing herself. Among other things, Poetry -would give her the chance to get into print, though not necessarily in its own pages; she hoped the magazine would generate others and a greater hospitality to new poetry. The project mattered so much to Monroe that she could not bring herself to admit how much hung on it. She was afraid of failure and almost afraid to hope. Defensively, she played down the two things vital to her project and the two things she felt she could count on: her own promotional skills and the likelihood that Chicago's businessmen were still enlightened enough to be the patrons of poetry. She talked tentatively of not knowing how to go about raising money and left it to a friend, the writer Hobart Chatfield Taylor, to articulate an idea that it is difficult not to believe she had thought of herself. But she writes, " he thought that I could get one hundred men in Chicago to subscribe fifty dollars a year for five years to try out the hazardous experiment provided I was willing to go to their offices and make the plea. In five years, he thought, the magazine would have proved its value [italics added]."28 Once the future of Poetry was secured, Harriet Monroe was to revert to assertive type. But during the campaign she played quite another role,

27 Ibid., p. 55. » Ibid., p. 243.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 65 low-key and deferential. The Harriet Monroe who sets about founding Poetry is not the ardent kindred spirit so readily identified by Ezra Pound in late 1912 as the only person beside himself "who takes the Art of Poetry seriously."29 Nor is it the woman whose passionate dedication to poetry led Kenneth Rexroth to describe her as "a provincial suffragette"; nor yet the abrasive individual whose good friend, Sara Teasdale, felt obliged to admit that: She has the gentle art of making enemies down to such an exquisitely fine point that Whistler would have sat at her feet like the man in the Bible at the feet of Gamaliel. She is an unpleasant person on the surface, full of sharp words.29 The founder of Poetry is bland, easy-going, self-effacing. She plays an undetected entrepreneurial game in which she manages to have her clients make the case for the product and, moreover, to take credit for the sale. She understates her own confidence and enthusiasm for poetry and Poetry to the extent that it is the Chicago businessmen, rather than herself, who emerge as the enthusiasts, the idealists. It is they who say "inspiring things," who "remind" her "of what "we all owe to the immortals" by replying "Of course put me down I don't know any better way to pay my debt to Shelley." They state things " more eloquently than I could state them myself." She is simply "pleased" at what is happening; the campaign seems to go on without her, "gaining prestige and momentum as it progressed." She appears passive. "If he had declined" she wrote of one admitted canvassing success, " I should have been — not pleased, of course, but satisfied." She seems almost not to care; to be involved in a pastime rather than a passion. She seems incredulous when she reaches her target, and she comes near to deflating her achievement. " The last pledges came in rapidly; people had heard about the project and were more open to conviction or at least to an amused willingness to stake something on it."30 Harriet Monroe had deliberately replaced the audacious overkill of 1891—93 with the artful undersell of 1911—12. A close reading of her autobiography reveals a discrepancy between the -way she presented her project to potential sponsors and what she really thought and felt. That she had planned her campaign is clear. She consistently and diplomatically deferred to points of view not her own. If necessary, she would imaginatively entertain other people's attitudes, noting "the idea 01

29 Pound to Harriet Monroe, Mar. 1913, in The letters of Et(ra Pound 1907-41, D. D. Paige (ed.) (London, 1951), p. 43; Eric Mottram (ed)., The Rexroth Reader (London, 1971), pp. 120—21; Sara Teasdale, quoted in Louis Untcrmeyer, From Another World (New York, 1929), p. 174. 30 Poet's 'Life, pp. 244-46.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 66 Ann Massa such a magazine seemed a bit amusing even to me." She determined not to appear bohemian or fanatical 'when she outlined her scheme, and not to seem disgruntled if and when she was turned down. One reproachful interview and the ranks might close against her. Such an unpretentious presentation of so high-flown a cause was disarming. And in keeping things casual she was utilizing another kind of shock tactic. Some of those she approached •would remember "with resigned admiration the old, belligerent Harriet Monroe of the 1890s; subsequently they and others had become used to encountering and on occasion deflecting her strident, campaigning journalism. (She had argued the merit of the design and the location of new shops, apartment and office buildings; she had criticized the unoriginal architecture of the University of Chicago; she had canvassed aggressively for the 1909 Burnham Plan). Now she surprised and won them with her technical about-face. They could only infer from her uncharac- teristic mildness how very much she cared. Passing off their response and her approach in the same defensively lighthearted way, she writes that they were " amused " by her; perhaps they were touched, too, by her painstaking, almost painful tactfulness. In visiting men's offices I developed a certain rule... it was quite the natural thing to enter into a smile and a laugh with the magnate if he thought my scheme ridiculous; and I never resented refusals from people I could not persuade [like Julius Rosenwald] feeling that they had a perfect right to encourage their own hobbies and disregard mine.31 To conceive, even temporarily, of poetry as a hobby, must have cost her a good deal. The notion was so utterly at variance with her characteristic contention that the art was "a vital force in life, and poets... the special agents of that force."32 This apparent flexibility was generated and reinforced by an inflexible faith in the poets and the public, in her sponsors and herself; and she would have taken indignant issue with those critics who have subsequently found it difficult to understand how she raised the confidence and the money to found Poetry.33 In A Poet's Life and elsewhere there are telling admissions

31 Ibid., p. 245. 32 Harriet Monroe, "Your chairman, in asking me to respond to this toast," speech given at the time of Poetry's first anniversary, Harriet Monroe Papers. See, too, the tone and the content of her publicity material {Poetry files, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago) and almost any of her editorials. 38 Even Ellen Williams, in her fine work on the early years of Poetry, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912-22 (Urbana, Chicago, 1977)* expressed surprise at Monroe's ability to attract as sponsors men "not obviously eligible as patrons of a magazine of verse," and she writes: "When one considers that Harriet

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 67 of her fundamental faith. For instance, it was not until the late summer of 1912, more than twelve months after she had seriously begun to sell the idea of Poetry and only four months before the first scheduled issue of the magazine, that she began, unworriedly, unhurriedly, to read all the recent poetry she could find in the Chicago Public Library's collections of newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She simply believed "there must be poets." They were as inevitable and as natural as landscape, and she was not surprised that "when Poetry was founded in Chicago in 1912, the poets came trooping in like bees in a clover field." She viewed the question of Poetry's audience in a similar spirit. "We believe that there is a public for poetry, but that it is scattered and unorganized." She admitted that: believing in the existence of "mute inglorious Miltons," or at least of lesser smothered geniuses, who might be waiting for a hearing, I was pushed on to the second stage of my campaign by the same faith which had carried me through the financial first stage.34 She had had faith, then, all the time. She had believed the businessmen would come through as much as she believed in the existence of poets, but it had suited her, for personal and practical reasons, not to assume too openly the inevitability of a supportive response. Nevertheless, she was convinced of her own ability to succeed. I felt that I should be well enough known in my home town to have won my right to have a hearing; so if a secretary proved immovable, I secured from some friends of his chief an introduction so authoritative that he had to pass me in.... After all the to-do I had made to reach him with my plea for a lost art, the poor man had to sign up.35 The rich men, and/or their families — the Swifts, Palmers, McCormicks, Pullmans, Crlessners, Insulls, Kohlsaats and Blaines — did sign up; so did less well-known bank presidents, wholesale grocers and paint manufac- turers. Her words leave it unclear whether it was the to-do or the plea which won support. In fact, it was neither, for if there is a mover, a hero in the Poetry project it is, in the autobiography, the art itself. What she uncovers is generosity for the sake of poetry. Poetry triumphs over a campaign that

Monroe had nothing to give a donor in return for fifty follars a year, no institution behind her that could impress a social climber or publicize his generosity, it seems wonderful that she succeeded. She must have impressed the businessmen, and they impressed her" (pp. 16—17). Poet's Ufe, pp. 249—50; lecture given at the University of Chicago, 20 July 1920, Harriet Monroe Papers. 35 Poet's Life, p. 245.

I-2-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 68 s\nn Mass a •would otherwise have been lacklustre and a response that would otherwise have been pedestrian. What she does admit to is her own commitment to that art and its practitioners. "The poets needed a magazine, an organ of their own, and I would start one for them." And again: "Could I search them out and assemble them, and find the necessary public for them?"36 Once the need for role-playing had passed, Harriet Monroe showed her confident hand, and quickly demonstrated the optimistic, commonsense American business philosophy that once a problem has been diagnosed, will, influence and money can provide the solution. She took upon herself the role of poetry's self-appointed public relations officer. The chief reason for poetry being in the doldrums, she told the Tribune, was that having been poorly taught in schools and murdered in elocution classes it now "had no one to speak for it, no group of powerful citizens to take an interest in it, to plead its cause with planned and effective propaganda." Poetry had become "The Cinderella of the arts." Worse, "a Milton might be living in Chicago today and be unable to find an outlet for his verse."37 The situation was appalling; it could be retrieved. Not for her any defeatist assumption of widespread philistinism; not for her the theory that poetry automatically won the audience it deserved, nor the belief that the appreciation of poetry was confined to an elite. Poetry's Whitmanesque motto showed that action was needed: " to have great poets we must have great audiences too. " The consumers, the producers, the investors and the middleman would all play their parts. How fitting that even in its cultural dimension the brilliantly materialistic Chicago should throw up a practical champion who assumed that the product and the market existed; and who also diagnosed poetry's dilemma not as an artistic one but as a question of organization and presentation. But entrepreneurial bravura alone could not have sustained Poetry. Two other elements were necessary for that: a supply of significant poetry and an effective editorial policy. Both were forthcoming. Harriet Monroe had rightly assumed that new movements in art and architecture would be matched by new poetry.38 Her researches and canvassing, Ezra Pound's contacts (he was Poetry's foreign editor from 1912 to 1917), and, quickly, Poetry itself, generated a list of contributors which by T920 included Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay, Amy Lowell and Marianne Moore. By 1911 Harriet Monroe herself had matured in her discrimination of poetry and her ability to write it. Her lectures on poetry at the Newberry Library,39 her columns for the Chicago papers and her

36 Ibid., pp. 243, 250. 37 Ibid., pp. 242, 247. 38 Poet's IJfe, pp. 204-17. 39 Harriet Monroe Papers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 08:49:30, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800016339 Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs 69 emperimental free verse40 demonstrated an informed and enthusiastic commitment to an aggressively new poetry. " Even the most extravagant experiments, the most radical innovations are valuable, for the moment at least, as an assault against prejudice,"41 she wrote. Hand in hand with this commitment went her "Open Door" editorial policy of publishing "the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written."42 And she was determined in each issue, or at least over a year's run of issues, to publish a representative mixture of poems. As editor (from the first monthly issue of Poetry in October 191 2 until her death, aged seventy-five, in 1936), she infuriated many with the catholicity of her taste, which could seem like conservatism; and admittedly, the mixture could militate against excellence. But in retrospect, the wisdom and the skill of her policy and her choice proved manifest. And it was her policy, her choice, though a series of able assistant editors — Alice Corbin Henderson, Yvor Winters, Morton Zabel, Elder Olson — acted as first readers, and she occasionally handed Poetry over to a guest editor. Poetry has always published poems, not poets; Poetry has survived, while more partisan publications have gone under. William Carlos Williams rightly paid tribute to the stimulus and encouragement which Harriet Monroe's enterprise gave poetry, especially American poetry. "She brought up the tide" when poetry "was at a chronic ebb.... Others did the best of the •writing, but she did much of the work of establishment."43 But Ezra Pound's judgment that she was significant because "she set up a trade-journal in the best sense of the word"44 would have pleased Harriet Monroe most. It acknowledged her for what she was: a poetic businesswoman.

40 Chosen Poems. See especially "The Hotel," "The Turbine," "The Telephone." 41 "Introduction," in Harriet Monroe and Alice Henderson, The JSSejv Poetry (New York, 1932), p. xxxvii. 42 Editorial of November 1912, quoted in Poet's Life, p. 245. 43 William Carlos Williams, "Harriet Monroe, " New Repubtic, 94 (26 April 1938), 375—76. 44 Poetry, 49 (1956-37), i37-}8-