“The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written....”
—Harriet Monroe, “The Open Door”, November 1912
Volume 1 Number 1 of Poetry magazine.
When Poetry's first issue appeared in October 1912, the fifty-one-year-old Monroe could not have foreseen the magazine's impact. But it was exactly as if a bomb had exploded, and nothing would ever look, or sound, the same in American poetry again.
The editorial staff of the Poetry Foundation. See the Poetry Foundation staff list and editorial team masthead.