Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine began with the “Open Door”:
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.
In its first year Poetry published Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats and introduced Rabindranath Tagore to the English-speaking world just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
The magazine has since been in continuous publication for more than 100 years, making it the oldest monthly magazine devoted to verse in the English language.
