Author Description

"Poignant, hilarious, and brutally frank, Dear Editor reveals the personalities and untold stories behind the creation of modern poetry.". "Founded in 1912, Poetry became famous immediately by printing revolutionary poems by Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and many other then-unknown but now-classic authors. Over nine decades, Poetry has presented virtually every significant poet of the twentieth century - often for the first time - becoming a legend and, as Eliot said, "an American Institution."". "Dear Editor gathers over 600 surprisingly candid letters to and from the editors of Poetry to reveal the behind-the-scenes stories in the development of American poetry: Ezra Pound's opinion of T. S. Eliot ("It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet") and Robert Frost ("dull as ditch water... [but] set to be 'literchure' someday"); Edna St. Vincent Millay's pleas for an advance ("I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco"); Wallace Stevens on himself ("I have a pretty well-developed mean streak")." "Over sixty illustrations - author photographs, reproductions of original letters, and cartoons - further enliven this unusually rich cultural history."--BOOK JACKET.