Books: Chicago Poetry

A POET'S LIFE—Harriet Monroe—Macmillan ($5).

Some day the brief cultural flowering of Chicago before and during the War may seem to historians a matter of genuine literary significance. Now it looks like a forced, half-artificial, overenthusiastic affair that was principally important because it gave audiences to Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay and Sherwood Anderson, and because it produced the magazine, Poetry.

In the summer of 1911, a frail, 50-year-old spinster named Harriet Monroe began knocking on the doors of wealthy Chicagoans, trying to get 100 of them to pledge $50 annually...