Still Going Strong: On Volume 39 of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Magazine

Volume 39 of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse is a collection of content from the magazine across the sixth month period between October 1931 and March 1932. While most of the collection roughly 300 pages in length is indeed focused on poetry, the facets which caught my attention often had to do with other kinds of content – namely the sections “News Notes” and “Books Received.”

Now, it’s fair to say that only having an hour or so to analyze such an expansive yet concise collection was a primary force in making me pick and choose what to look at in brief glances and hurried notes. I admit that most of my judgments were likely premature and lacking in any real form of depth for this reason. That being said, much of my inspections were being made with the intent to garner a base of general knowledge or loose ideas which might later springboard into something more insightful or intriguing, hence my focus on two back-to-back sections which were of a more timely and domestic nature (for lack of far better terms) than the timelessness of the poetry.

The “News Notes” sections are at first exactly what they sound like, with editor Harriet Monroe making mention of various imminent events or notices which she finds important in relation to the poet community. The general impression of a news bulletin falls somewhat to the wayside as Monroe shifts her focus to the contributors of each issue, either introducing them or explaining the recent circumstances of their lives. In this sense, it becomes apparent that her aim is to connect the authors and their lives with their works, rather than leaving the poems in an abstract vacuum. Such a connection and its portrayal to the magazine’s readership suggests that the period around the modernist movement was built upon continuous interaction amongst poet communities as opposed to the stereotypical conception of the isolated and starving artist.

Moving on, there’s the “Books Received” section, which seems to list all of the poetry and prose which Monroe has received and wishes to make mention of to her readers. My aforementioned intent to use this content as a foundation for later discovery is one of the main reasons for my focus on this otherwise small section. There isn’t much else to say about the section, other than that I took barely readable pictures of every occurrence I could find in the collection as a whole. All of those pictures can be found below and are included here in the hopes that someone might find something worth investigating. Given the small size of the text, zooming in is highly recommended; the image resolutions should be enough so that everything is readable.