[In the following essay, Atlas studies the differing views of the Chicago Renaissance as expressed via the works and periodicals launched by Margaret Anderson and Harriet Monroe, pointing out that although the women had extremely different points of view, their diversity reflects the complex nature of the renaissance itself and is key to understanding that phenomenon.]

Since the 1887 Haymarket riots which strongly influenced such radical women as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, Chicago has proven to be a place where women learn and grow. Chicago's Columbian Exposition, held from May to October, 1893, demonstrated women's influence in the city. The World's Fair had a board of women managers, a woman's building designed by a woman architect, Sophia Hayden, and it served as a place where American women could gather and talk about the significance of their own past and the goals they wished to achieve in the future. The women who participated in the fair associated themselves with the Woman's Congress Auxiliary held during the same time and in both locations individuals lectured on women's place in history, drama, and industry. Chicago had made space for women to grow, and the women of Chicago were doing just that.

In the second decade of the twentieth century Chicago was feeling the impact of socialism, anarchism, and populism. The genteel tradition, an urban, upper class tradition, was giving way to a group of young artists from small towns who had made their way to Chicago in hope of developing their creative talents. These people were less interested in good manners than in creating new art forms and expressing themselves. Women, more than ever before, were in the forefront of the Chicago art circles: Ellen Van Volkenburg became one of the founders of the Chicago Little Theatre, Alice Gerstenberg wrote some of her best experimental drama, and Susan Glaspell began her publishing career.

During this decade two of Chicago's most important small journals were started by women. In 1912 Harriet Monroe began Poetry, a journal that fostered the new poetry movement; and in 1914 Margaret Anderson began the Little Review, a journal which established itself as the radical voice of the Chicago liberation. Both women had different visions of how to generate creativity in the city and of the purpose of such creativity. While Monroe insisted that artists must speak to the people and that they could only create if they had a worthy audience, Anderson believed that individuals must find their own freedom, and if they did this, with or without an audience, they would be able to create. Their roles in the Chicago Renaissance complemented one another: Harriet Monroe brought recognition to Chicago as a legitimate center for the arts and Margaret Anderson gave the city a mirror of its unactualized passion.

Before Monroe began Poetry she had a long career as a Chicago writer. Between 1889 and 1912 she had frequent articles or regular columns in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Times Herald, the New York Sun, Leslie's Weekly, the Atlantic, the Chicago American and the Chicago Evening Post. At two different periods, she served as art critic for the Chicago Tribune. She also wrote poetry and plays although her success at publishing these was only modest. She received her greatest notoriety as a poet in 1892 when her “Columbian Ode” was recited at the opening program of the World's Columbian Exposition.

But Monroe had been appointed the laureate of the fair only after protesting to the program committee that the art of poetry was insufficiently honored in the planned exposition. Poetry was not respected in America and this was underscored for her when New York World reprinted her ode without permission. She sued the paper for violation of copyright and won five thousand dollars. In bringing the case to court, she felt that she had served all poets whose works had been routinely reprinted without permission.

Monroe was only beginning her career as a defender of poets. She believed that the poet was the natural touchstone to honesty in a world rotted with cowardice and hypocrisy. According to her perception, poets were the most natural revolutionaries and they, better than anyone else, could help others create an organic and harmonious community. She would help artists give poetic expression to modern life by paying them for their contributions and helping them find an audience. If she could free them from financial strain and provide them with a receptive audience, she felt certain that they would create new forms out of modern conditions. Her poetry journal would provide a context where poets could create freely. Ellen Williams in Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance hypothesizes about Monroe's motivation in beginning her journal:

Perhaps the extra spark that drove Harriet Monroe into action came from the breakdown of her own literary career. Her combined failures to get a play on the stage and to get a book of poems published gave her, on return to Chicago from a trip to the Orient, a choice of retiring the literary figure Harriet Monroe or finding something new for her to do. She would not quit; she did not feel that her failure was personal.¹

As long as magazines were indifferent to poetry or insisted on no experimental form or content, American poetry could not develop. Monroe knew she wanted to start a poetry journal but she also knew that she could not do it without financial backing. She needed to find poetry the same powerful friends that other art forms such as theater, music, and painting had. Monroe decided to approach the same circles that had supported Chicago's earlier literary groups and cultural institutions and received the funding she needed.

Monroe contacted the poets whose work she found scattered in various journals and asked for their artistic contributions. In the circular she sent out in 1912, she explained her desire to foster new poetry and stated her policy: “We promise to refuse nothing because it is too good, whatever be the nature of its excellence.” She kept her office open so that poets could drop in to look over manuscripts and debate the new movement of free verse. Monroe mentioned in her memoirs that among her early callers were Arthur Davison Ficke, Agnes Lee, Edith Wyatt, Helen and Dorothy Dudley, Sara Teasdale, and Maurice Browne.

Monroe wanted to be perceived as a democratic editor, one who published the best poets from any school. She did not want to be associated with only one type of poetry or one class of people. For instance, when John G. Neihardt of Bancroft, Nebraska, attacked free verse she defended not only it, but her editorial policy. She believed she was being both democratic and objective:

You ask, “Why make your magazine a freak?” I don't see why a few poems or editorials that we print would place it in that category, even if they seem to you freakish, for surely we have been hospitable to all kinds and have not confined ourselves to any one school.²

Monroe tried to remain open to all forms of poetry, but she found that she was afraid to offend her upper class and upper-middle class guarantors by appearing too radical. Monroe knew that she had created her magazine out of Chicago's willingness to make poetry a civic institution and that without her guarantors she would have no journal. When she did not find her relationships to bohemian artists threatening, she enjoyed them and helped them as she could: she realized that Carl Sandburg's poem, “Chicago” would be perceived by some as vulgar, but she delighted in publishing it. The poem's images were unusually physical.

Hog Butcher for the World
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.(3)

She defended its unusual, physical imagery with pleasure against the Dial's attacks and enjoyed the excitement of controversy: “Next to making friends, the most thrilling experience of life is to make enemies. Neither adventure being possible to the dead. …”⁴

But when more than a passionate argument was at stake, Monroe withdrew. She recorded in her memoirs that Poetry's war poem issue was almost impounded by the Post Office because of the realistic detail in a poem by John Russel McCarthy. She was afraid that her guarantors might desert her journal and in the next months she was careful not to offend the government again. “Nothing in this for us,” she noted on a passionate protest against the censorship of works of art in the United States. She printed neither an editorial protesting the tariff on books imported in the United States, nor an article that asked that contributing poets get paid ＄25.00 a page instead of ＄8.00. Monroe was too frightened of losing her journal to realize that embracing Carl Sandburg's controversial poetry was not enough to foster creative freedom.

But Harriet Monroe did what she could. She was brave enough to fight her foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, who believed American poets were unequal to those in Europe. Convinced that American poets would burgeon if allowed an audience, she refused to give in to Pound who kept asking her to leave American poets out and print more material from Europe. She consistently refused to allow Pound the control over the journal he wanted.

Monroe remained editor of Poetry until her death in 1936 and continued to provide a place for the best poetry she could find. She saw herself as a bridge between the American genteel tradition and the new bohemian wave and this gave her editorial style an individualized texture. The writing style of her memoirs also reflects her careful ability to balance and her need to defend the middle stance she often took. Although she herself never became one of the great new poetic voices, Monroe succeeded in helping other voices, stronger than her own, be heard. Among the artists she sponsored were T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsey.

In her memoirs, Monroe made clear that she perceived herself as an important person in the new poetry movement. In them, she reiterated several times that Poetry fought for innovative technique, for modern diction, and for a more vital relation with the poet's own time and place. Poetry, she reminded her readers, was the first journal to devote itself to innovative poetry. She was angry at critics like Babette Deutsch who dared write a history of the modern poetry movement and leave her journal out.⁵ Margaret Anderson, the founder of the Little Review, also offended her by failing to give Poetry proper recognition:

As for Margaret Anderson, founder-editor of the picturesque Little Review, … her autobiography simply makes blanket claim to most of the poets whom Poetry had introduced a year or two before her first issue, and presents Mr. Yeats' Poetry-banquet speech … as if he had written it for her magazine.⁶

Monroe wanted the credit she earned. Her journal began in 1912 and it was not until 1920 that most of the major new poets began to appear in Scofield Thayer's new Dial instead of Poetry.⁷ But even if she stopped serving as the first publisher of the new poets, she was the first harbinger of the modern poetry movement, and its first editor, and for that she deserves the recognition for which she asks.

A generation younger than Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson had few connections with members of the older art circles and few loyalties to traditional Chicago. Her identification was with Chicago's bohemian wave: for part of her ten year editorship of the Little Review she considered herself a philosophical anarchist. If Harriet Monroe represented balance and brought prestige to the Chicago Renaissance, Margaret Anderson represented exuberance.

Margaret Anderson was a firm believer in self-expression and because her world did not foster it, she became a fighter:

I wasn't born to be a fighter. I was born with a gentle nature, a flexible character and an organism as equilibrated as it is judged hysterical. I shouldn't have been forced to fight constantly and ferociously. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter. Once you start such an idea you find that it creeps up on you. I remember periods when I have been so besieged that I had to determine on a victory a day in order to be sure of surviving.⁸

Originally from Columbus, Indiana, Chicago represented to her a place where she might learn to express herself. Her first Chicago job was writing for the Interior, a religious journal edited by Clara Laughlin. But she was soon writing for the Friday Literary Review, Chicago's most lively book review, edited at that time by Francis Hackett and Floyd Dell.

Anderson was almost magically charismatic; when she was sure of what she wanted her enthusiasm almost effortlessly won her backers. In 1914, she thought of beginning the Little Review, a magazine of the arts “making no compromise with the public taste.” In her memoirs she stated that she had no anxiety about finding a sponsor: “I knew that someone would give the money. This is one kind of natural law I always see in operation. Someone would have to. Of course someone did.”⁹

The first individual she found to sponsor her magazine was Dewitt C. Wing, an agricultural journalist she had met through Floyd Dell and his wife, Margery Currey, another talented, bohemian Chicago writer.

Wing's response to her was not untypical:

I was bowled over by her vitality, her beauty, and her voluble enthusiasms. On a winter Saturday I took her to Long Beach, Long Island, not yet spoiled as an overcrowded public resort, and we had a long walk on the hard sand, refreshed by the clean winter air. Western breezes blew spume back from the tips of charging breakers, while seagulls wove their patterns of flight not far above the sea and beach. We talked about the sorry state of American letters, and the trashy bestsellers which publishers promoted in their competition for profit. We agreed that something new and adventurous must be done to encourage writers of integrity and talent.¹⁰

Wing was not alone in responding so strongly to her. She quickly found additional guarantors. Anderson had confidence that the universe would protect her and that she would get what was essential to her. One of her essentials was getting a Mason Hamlin piano. She had no money but was willing to trade advertisement for the loan of one. It was better than a Steinway, and she needed to have the best. The manager agreed, and she picked her piano out from among a hundred.¹¹

The Little Review, from its very first issue, represented Margaret Anderson perfectly. She set no limits on the magazine, assembling it each month according to the principle of inspiration that was most strong in her at the moment. The Little Review demanded no consistency and specialized in “call to action” editorials addressing the need for personal freedom. The journal enjoyed a conversational tone, and frequently printed spoofs of more serious art. The first public response to the printing of “Prufrock” appeared in the Little Review for September 1915 when Arthur Davison Ficke began his poem “Cafe Sketches” with, “I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness / Like scrambled egg on a skillet.”

Margaret Anderson was no dull professional: she enjoyed flirting with chaos. But this did not diminish the seriousness of either her interest in fresh experiments or in getting the middle class to understand new ideas. A teacher and revolutionary, in March 1916, she wrote an essay for the Little Review explaining the relationship, as she saw it, between anarchists and artists:

An anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life: the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of. …

Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist's ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn't matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It's your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds!

If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. …

And finally when you see that you never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that the wonder of life begins here—when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is “left over” will find its music or its words.¹²

Anderson perceived relationships where few others did: anarchists rely on themselves as do artists; life for them is beneficent because they insist on its being so.

Margaret Anderson embraced challenge, and was eternally interested in performance and response. She was not afraid of being offensive. If she felt she received no art worth publishing she simply sent out an issue of the Little Review that was blank; if the government wanted to fine her for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses she would be docile only up to a point: when it came to getting her fingerprints taken she gave the registers as complicated a time as possible and at the end of the ordeal simply stated that it could happen again because she still had no idea how one recognizes obscenity.¹³

Unlike Harriet Monroe, her loyalty was not to Chicago, not to America, not to her journal, not to artifact, but to her own human development. After working in Chicago for five years, she felt that it was time to move to New York and then Paris. She believed in stretching, and that human growth was everything.

When Sinclair Lewis, not liking her abstractions, cancelled his subscription to the Little Review stating, “I no longer understand anything in it, so it no longer interests me,” she responded with playful mockery, “Please cease sending me your socialist paper. I understand everything in it, therefore it no longer interests me.”¹⁴

Because Margaret Anderson believed that growth came organically, she tried to create, not by forcing her nature, but by allowing her nature to be. In My Thirty Years' War, she attempted to explain her theory of creativity:

Jane and I began to construct a good sense program of piano technique. I was a good subject, having never been able to follow the precepts given me by any teacher—that is, I could follow them but they seemed to me to mean nothing.

First, we had to establish how small a part the hand and fingers play in piano technique. Second, how small a part practice plays in acquiring technique. Practice is a stupid thing. Painters don't practice—they paint. Poets don't practice—they make poems. They correct, revise, or reconceive, but they don't sit doing the same thing over and over for hours, days, months. … But it is silly—supremely silly—to sit and practice the piano. I partake of this silliness.¹⁵

Throughout her memoirs, Anderson presented herself as a serious woman who was trying to make her behavior parallel her theories and trying to achieve an increasingly beautiful life. The metaphor with which she ended The Thirty Years' War reflected the fact that she felt by 1929 that she was getting closer to being in control: “I think of Chicago and the lighthouse sending its searchlight into my window. I no longer look out upon a lighthouse. I live in one.”¹⁶

Margaret Anderson's life and her journal represent her eternal quest for truth. In her second autobiographical work, The Fiery Fountains, she was still trying to attain her full humanity, to be the pianist and not the piano, and to find the natural order of eternal laws. After she stopped editing the Little Review she studied mysticism, searching for the art beyond the artifact. In creating the Little Review she helped to create a climate of feeling and opinion of which art of a certain kind was almost inevitable, but when that artifact, that art, ceased to be enough for her, she left it behind.

Bernard Duffey, in his ground breaking work, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters, does not see the motivational power behind her idealism. He found her theory about people's need to be independent absurd and introduced it with “In October of 1914 humanity was relieved of its interdependence.”¹⁷ This is the specific theory of human integrity which his comment mocks:

That human being is of most use to other people who has first become of most use to himself. … Only on such a base is built up that intensity of inner life which is the soul compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors … and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.¹⁸

To laugh at Anderson's stance on human integrity is to laugh at the spirit of the Chicago Renaissance. Although she and the Little Review left Chicago in the midst of it, both she and her journal were very much part of its strongest years. Her editorials and memoirs, if not major works of art, are interesting mirrors of the period, and of her search not so much for art, as for art's raison d'etre.

The differences between Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, differences in generation, in vision, in sensibility, and in style, present well the diversity of the Chicago Renaissance and the intensely different and serious roles that women played in creating and defining it. To study them is to get a little closer to the complex spirit of the Chicago liberation.

Notes

1. Ellen Williams, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 13.

2. Letter from Harriet Monroe to John G. Neihardt, June 24, 1913, as reprinted in Williams, p. 51.

3. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” reprinted in American Literature, Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, ed. (New York: St. Marken's Press, 1973), p. 1849.

4. Editorial in Poetry, May, 1914, as reprinted in Williams, p. 101.

5. Harriet Monroe, A Poet's Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), p. 362.

6. Monroe, p. 363.

7. Williams, p. 221.

8. Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance (New York: Appleton-Century), p. 245.

9. Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years' War (New York: Covici, Friede, 1930), p. 36.

10. Kramer, pp. 246-7.

11. Anderson, p. 67.

12. Margaret Anderson, “Art and Anarchism,” Little Review, III, 1 (1916), pp. 3, 6.

13. Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, pp. 221-2.

14. Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, p. 128.

15. Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, p. 202.

16. Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, p. 274.

17. Bernard Duffey, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1954), p. 192.

18. Duffey, p. 192.