(Harold Monro was the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in Lond...)
Harold Monro was the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in London. Monro was born in Brussels and educated in England, attending Radley and Cambridge. This work was published in 1909. Monro died at the age of 53.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact and remains as true to the original work as possible.
(This work was published in December 1914. Harold Monro ha...)
This work was published in December 1914. Harold Monro had also published Judas in 1908 and Before Dawn in 1911. Harold Monro was born in Brussels in 1879.
(Harold Monro was the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in Devo...)
Harold Monro was the owner of the Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire street London. He published this work in April 1917 during the Great War; there are fifteen poems in this collection.
Harold Monro was a British poet. He is most well-known as the founder of three important journals - Poetry Review (1911), Poetry and Drama (1913), and Chapbook (1919-1925) - as well as for his Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, London, which became a major center for the intelligentsia of his time.
Background
Harold Monro was born on March 14, 1869, in Brussels, Belgium, to Scottish parents Edward William (an English engineer) and Arabella Sophia Margary Monro. His father and brother died early in his life, losses that would shape his outlook and may account for the melancholic tone of much of his poetry. By the time he was seven, the family had moved to London.
Monro came from a long line of well-established men, many of which were doctors and surgeons. He would not follow the family medical tradition, and instead pursued a career as a writer and editor.
Education
Monro had a comfortable upbringing and was sent to Radley College for his early education but was expelled, for smuggling wine into his room. He later enrolled at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, taking courses in modem and medieval languages.
Monro, along with his friend Maurice Browne, founded the Samurai Press, a venture inspired by H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia. In 1907, they anonymously published a collaborative effort titled Proposals for a Voluntary' Nobility. In it, they presented Samurai Press’s vision of the “elite... progressive thinkers and poets,” and included their ban on promiscuity, alcohol, smoking, gambling, and beards. In the same year, they published Monro’s pamphlet, The Evolution of the Soul, which declared that the Church betrayed the message of humanitarianism espoused by Christ. Also in that year, they published Monro’s rather unremarkable 400-line blank verse poem, Judas. Comito found that this poem “situate[s] a Browningesque monologue in a melodramatically gloomy landscape showing the influence of James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night."
Though a few poets sought out publication at Samurai, including John Drinkwater and Wilfred Gibson, the press never found great success. Additionally, Monro’s marriage was dissolving. He drifted through Europe, romantically recording his solitary walk from Paris to Milan in The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage: Paris to Milan on Foot. During these travels, he exposed himself to a number of influences, including Tolstoy disciples, free love, an English colony in Florence, and a devotee of Walt Whitman named Edward Carpenter, a champion of cosmic consciousness, marriage reform, and homosexuality. In 1911, Monro published the optimistic Before Dawn, which Comito called "the product of his search for this miracle during his years of wandering.” The verse contained romantic prognostications of a utopian world, including a dedication that mentioned the “beautiful Future, which alone we may call God.”
Monro returned from Italy to England in the fall of 1911 and took over editorship of the literary vehicle of the Poetry Society, the Poetical Gazette, changing its name to the Poetry Review. However, it was apparent that his strength was not in editing: he twice declined T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock when it was offered to him by Conrad Aiken. He left the Poetry Society and founded the Poetry Bookshop in London as well as a new quarterly periodical called Poetry and Drama, which lasted for eight issues from 1913 until the beginning of World War I.
The Poetry Bookshop opened on January 8, 1913, in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. It was meant to exist as a bookstore, a publishing house, and a venue for readings. It even became a rooming house for destitute writers. Of its many publications, the best known is the “Georgian Poetry” series (1911-1912). The Bookshop, run with Monro’s characteristic generosity and openness, was a place for all camps of the literary scene. A World Authors contributor expressed the fraternizing of the intellectual hub: “This was a place for all kinds of poets, not for factions: so the strident leader of Futurism, Marinetti, rubbed shoulders with the innocuous Gibson, and the flamboyant Pound mixed with W. H. Davies.” Through this venture. Monro became one of the most influential individuals in English literature at the time. The year 1914 saw the Poetry Bookshop’s publication of his Children of Love and the outbreak of World War I, which effectively ended Poetry and Drama. He was sent to Manchester, where he served with the Royal Artillery at an anti-aircraft station. The Bookshop continued under the direction of his friend and chief assistant, Alida Klemantaski, whom he met in 1913.
Monro’s subsequent assignment to the Intelligence Department in London allowed him to resume his duties at the Bookshop. In 1916, he divorced Dorothy, and the Poetry Bookshop published his book, Trees. In the following year, also under the Bookshop's imprint, he published Strange Meetings, a twenty-one- poem sequence.
Comito saw Trees and Strange Meetings as “attempts to give systematic philosophical expression to Monro’s sense of exclusion from life’s fullness and his need to escape from the torment of introspection.” A contributor to the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English stated that “much of his poetry is classifiable as Georgian in its descriptive celebrations of the countryside as a liberating antidote to the dispiriting effects of London.”
Monro’s return to civilian life was marked by his editorship at a new periodical, the Chaphook, which he edited from 1919 to 1925. In 1923, Macmillan published a collection of poems titled Real Property. A. William Ellis, writing for the Spectator, stated that “the poems in Mr. Monro’s new volume are singularly uneven. Some are cold with the chilliness of five-finger exercises, some in their effortful sincerity contain lines and phrases of complete bathos, and only here and there do we get a fusion of ingredients which make a poem. When we do get it, it is worth having.” In 1928, The Earth for Sale was published in London as well as in New York. A reviewer for the New Statesman asserted that “The Earth for Sale is probably the most valuable book of verse published during the current year.”
A contributor to the Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers concluded that “his posthumous volume of Collected Poems is some tribute to a man split between the mystical, the whimsical, and the effective.”
Monro is most famous for his role supporting poets and poetry as founder and editor of the magazines Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama and as a proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, a meeting place, in the years leading up to World War I and after, for both Georgian and Modernist poets. Monro is sometimes credited with helping formulate the terms for a more “realistic” kind of war poem.
Harold Monro made an essential contribution to the development of Great War poetry. As founder and proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, and editor of his own periodical, Poetry, and Drama, he felt a responsibility to survey the mass of verse that began appearing as soon as war broke out. He commissioned Edward Thomas to write an article about it (War Poetry, Poetry, and Drama, December 1914 - the best early study of the subject) and assembled a large collection of press cuttings for display in the shop.
Before the war, Monro had been intensely idealistic, convinced that poets should unite to build a new and better world. He opened the Poetry Bookshop in December 1912 to be a meeting place for poets and a center for the propagation of their work. Frequent visitors included Gibson, Hulme, Pound, Thomas, Owen, Rupert Brooke and, later, T.S. Eliot. Monro loathed the war, but he reluctantly volunteered in 1916, just before he was due to be conscripted, and became a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. His health was poor, and he never served abroad. Lacking direct experience of front-line horrors, he could not write about them as Owen or Sassoon did and did not try to. After 1918 he revived the Bookshop, started a new periodical and gave strong support to Eliot and other new poets, but the war had destroyed his hopes and ideals.
Monro was affiliated with a progressive community devoted to socialism, vegetarianism, and the utopian ideology favored by John Ruskin and William Moms.
Personality
During the 1920s though he became disillusioned by the sorry state of Europe and had begun to lose faith in his bookshop enterprise, disappointed that many budding writers who he had helped now had no time for him. His publishing ventures had made a serious dent in his finances and he began to drink excessively to forget his troubles. This will, no doubt, have affected his health and he contracted a fatal dose of tuberculosis. Toward the end of his life, Monro was beleaguered by painful ailments, near-blindness, alcoholism, and general mental despair.
Aiming to encourage the poets of the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte Mew and Amma Wickham.
Quotes from others about the person
"His poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr. Yeats's." - T. S. Eliot
Interests
Writers
Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Connections
Monro’s love life was complicated, and though he was rumored as being a homosexual, he would choose to only marry women.
While visiting Germany, Monro fell in love with Dorothy Elizabeth Browne, the sister of his friend Maurice Browne. They married in 1903 and had a son the following year. Dorothy was not particularly fond of Ireland, and by 1906, the family was back in London. In 1916, he divorced Dorothy.
In 1920, he married his long-standing assistant, Alida Klemantaski. Their relationship seems to have been an intellectual rather than a physical one.
Father:
Edward William Monro
Mother:
Arabella Sophia Margary Monro
Spouse:
Alida Klemantaski
Alida, his second wife whom Monro had married in 1920, lovingly nursed him and remained his closest aid during his physical and mental collapse.
ex-spouse:
Dorothy Elizabeth Browne
Son:
Nigel Monro
Nigel Monro was born in Ireland, where Harold was working as a land agent for a family friend. He followed a family tradition and became involved with medicine.
Harold Monro’s wife, Alida, was a friend to both Mew sisters. This helped Charlotte and Harold to develop a close friendship until the end of her days.
