"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. 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 54 Ann Massa Interesting characters, all three: [Edward F.] Lawrence, a typical big-businessman of the highest class, straight as a die, absolutely firm-minded and incorruptible, acknowledging ignorance of the arts and accepting guidance. [Charles T.j Yerkes [the model for Dreiser's Cowperwood], a man of might then at the beginning of his high-handed reign over city politics and his vain efforts to reign also, with his wife, in "society"; but always a strange combination of guile and glamour, thrilling with power like a steel spring, loving beauty as a Mazda lamp loves the switch that lights it; [James W.] Ellsworth, a cultivator of beauty, somewhat intuitively a-ware of it, but more aware of the expediency of using it as a side issue, a precious ornament, in the all-round career of a modern industrial leader, deriving his pattern from the Medici or other famous art patrons of the Renaissance.5 She found them intriguing people; she believed them to be individually susceptible to culture and not disinclined to assume a role of cultural responsibility.