the john muir exhibit - people - harriet monroe
Harriet Monroe
1860-1936
- Poet and literary
critic.
- A participant
in several Sierra Club outings, Harriet met John Muir, and wrote A tribute to John Muir in 1916.
- Sierra Club Secretary William
E. Colby wrote
the following memorial to Harriet Monroe in the Sierra Club
Bulletin for February, 1937:
"The many friends of Harriet Monroe will, I know, appreciate
information as to her death, which occurred in Peru, September 26,
1936. Miss Monroe went with the Sierra Club on several of its early
outings. She was most enthusiastic in her fondness for the Sierra
and wrote several beautiful poems as a result of this inspiration.
On the 1908 outing she wrote a poetic idyll, having for its main
thought the friendliness of all out-door life toward John Muir, who
was also with the Club on that trip. This was enacted at the campfire
one never-to-be-forgotten night and John Muir was induced, very much
against his wishes, to take part in the out-of-door drama. Miss Monroe
was a strong supporter of what the Sierra Club was endeavoring to
accomplish and appeared before committees in Congress to urge important
measures. In 1912 she inaugurated publication of the Poetry magazine
in Chicago, the city in which she was born and lived. Many predicted
failure, but Poetry has become one of the outstanding
publications of verse and has survived all these years. Much has
been written in eulogy of her full life, but the opening lines of "Requiem
for H.M." by John Gould Fletcher seem most appropriate to us
of the Sierra Club:
Where rise the mountains, condor-haunted,
To this height,
In a far land, by death undaunted,
She has slipped away to night."
- A noted poet,
Harriet Monroe founded Poetry Magazine in 1912. From the outset, Poetry magazine raised the visibility and status of poetry in America. The journal published and promoted the careers of a galaxy of poets including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Rabindranath Tagore, and Vachel Lindsay, among many others. According to the University of Chicago, "Poetry magazine transformed the way that poetry and poets are recognized and read worldwide, and it continues to flourish as a major cultural influence." Her own works include several volumes of poetry; her essays Poets and Their Art (1933); the anthology she compiled with Alice Corbin Henderson, The New Poetry (1917); and her autobiography, A Poet's Life (1938).
Photo of Harriet Monroe by Eva Watson Schutze from
Vanity Fair,
August 1920, courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library.
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