Whitewashing Poetic Form in Poetry Magazine

This article revisits the gender politics of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse during founding editor Harriet Monroe’s tenure (1912–1936). Although Poetry is often lauded for achieving gender parity and publishing formally experimental poetry, it is rarely acknowledged that the magazine published zero Black women poets in its first decades of existence. This article argues that reading Poetry from this constitutive absence brings into view the antiblack reproductive logic that drove Poetry’s editorial choices. This article shows that Monroe and her collaborators engaged with Anglo-Saxonist prosodic histories and plantation imaginaries to construct experimental poetry as key to the reproduction of whiteness.