With the help of patron and friend HC Taylor, Monroe organized a scheme to fund the magazine – the pair solicited one hundred businessmen and women to pledge fifty dollars a year for five years to ensure Poetry's economic stability during its infancy.

Starting at a salary of forty dollars a month, Monroe began to look for contributors. She sent a “poets circular” to fifty American and British poets almost all of whom replied to her inquiry of interest. Among her earliest and most notable supporters were Ezra Pound, who served as the magazine’s foreign editor; and the indispensable Alice Corbin Henderson, Monroe’s associate editor. In its first years Poetry boasted an impressive list of contributors which included Wallace Stevens, Lindsay Vachel, and W.B. Yeats, as well as several pioneers in the “Imagiste” movement, notably Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell.

One of the more conservative little magazines in print, Poetry gained the respect of a wide audience. It published the first poems of fledgling poets like Marianne Moore as well as the work of more established poets like T.S Eliot and Robert Frost. As it increased in both prestige and age, Poetry has become the definitive magazine of verse, publishing both minor and canonized twentieth century poets.

Compiled by Alice Neumann Class of "06 & Simone Muller, 1-year-International, Germany @ Davidson College