War Poems from 1914

Extract

In October 1912 the first issue of Harriet Monroe's new journal, Poetry: A magazine of verse, appeared. The last has yet to come. In an era when little magazines came and went like mayflies, Poetry came and has refused to go. The journal had it all—in its early years it was at the forefront of debates about imagism, vers libre, and other issues concerning the “proper” form and content for poetry. Monroe, its editor, is still insufficiently appreciated as a major figure in literary modernism. We hope to change that. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) has completed a digital edition of the first eleven years of this distinguished journal, using original copies provided by the University of Chicago Library, supplemented in some instances by copies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library. Those of us working on this edition have discovered many interesting things, including the first publication of Joyce Kilmer's “Trees,” which Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren later used as the primary example of bad poetry in their New Critical textbook, Understanding Poetry (274–78).