OThe history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,O wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. EliotOs OLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,O Carl SandburgOs OChicago Poems,O Wallace StevensOs OSunday Morning,O and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become AmericaOs most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades_an unprecedented record.
Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents_along with several lesser known_in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank OOHara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise GlYck, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry Oan American institution.O The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake
Joseph Parisi joined Poetry in 1976 and served as its tenth editor from 1983D2003. Among his books are Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist and, with Stephen Young, Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. Mr. Parisi has also edited a definitive modern poetry collection, 100 Essential Modern Poems published with Ivan R. Dee in 2005. Stephen Young, former senior editor of Poetry, is program director of the Poetry Foundation. He was educated at Dartmouth and joined the magazine in 1988. Messrs. Parisi and Young live in Chicago.
