A poet of substance in her own right, Harriet Monroe is best known as the founder of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Monroe's twenty-four-year editorship of the magazine earned her a prominent place among those who shaped twentieth-century poetry and literary taste. Her leadership and the role the magazine played in nurturing and focusing the modern movement in poetry can hardly be overestimated. The magazine provided early and continued recognition for a rising generation of poets that included Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, Amy Lowell, and Robert Frost. Its pages became a forum for the development of poetic theory and the airing of controversies that arose as modern poetry moved away from romanticism and toward realism, free verse, and precise imagery.

Monroe was born in Chicago on 23 December 1860. In childhood, she saw herself as a loner in a family kept off...