Harold Monro

1879–1932

Harold Monro was a poet who helped other poets find publishers, audiences and one another. His Poetry Bookshop in London brought readings, lodging, magazines and book publishing into one enterprise. In The Year’s at the Spring, he appears both as a contributor of poems and as a critic explaining how ordinary language and close observation can give poetry its force.

A poet’s search for a public

Harold Edward Monro was born in Brussels in 1879. He attended Radley College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied languages. Poetry was already becoming a serious pursuit: at Cambridge he discussed writing with a small circle of friends and presented a paper on Swinburne. His early literary ambitions developed alongside an interest in social change and the possibilities of a different kind of community.

The Samurai Press, founded in 1906, expressed his hopes for a community renewed through literature and social change, influenced by H. G. Wells. His early books included Chronicle of a Pilgrimage, an account of a walk from Paris to Milan, and Before Dawn.

The Poetry Bookshop and the war

Monro edited The Poetry Review in 1912 before establishing his own Poetry and Drama. The Poetry Bookshop began trading in late 1912 and held its formal opening in January 1913 at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury. Readers could buy books and hear poems spoken aloud; poets could meet there, and some lodged above the shop. It was a business sustained by a larger ambition to make poetry part of a shared life.

Its publishing list crossed literary divisions. Monro issued Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies as well as the English edition of Des Imagistes, associated with the emerging Imagist movement. He published early books by Richard Aldington and Robert Graves, among others. His later magazine, The Chapbook, continued that interest in varied forms of contemporary writing. Alida Klemantaski, whom he married in 1920, became closely involved in the bookshop’s life.

Books and contributions

1 work in the current library

The Year's at the Spring

Compiled by L. D'O. Walters; illustrated by Harry Clarke; introduction by Harold Monro

Poetry & Literature

Sources and further reading

The First World War tested those hopes. In 1914 Monro commissioned Edward Thomas to assess war poetry and called for verse attentive to human experience. His attachment to Basil Watt, whom he feared losing, informed Youth in Arms; Watt’s death at Loos prompted Lament in 1915. Monro joined the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916, but poor health kept him from serving overseas.

The Year’s at the Spring

The Year’s at the Spring clearly separates its collaborators: L. D’O. Walters compiled the anthology, Harry Clarke illustrated it, and Monro supplied the introduction. The held New York title page names Brentano’s; a separate imprint gives September 1920 as the work’s first publication. Monro’s introduction asks readers to value the particular poems selected, rather than treating the book as a list of distinguished names.

In the introduction, Monro argues that a poet should examine familiar things closely instead of inflating a grand subject. Poetry gives pleasure by stirring imagination and emotion, but the reader must prepare to notice its effects. He praises Yeats’s enjoyment of earthly life and questions religious sentiment in other selections. His criticism makes the anthology an occasion to argue for his own values as a poet.

Three of Monro’s own poems show the range behind that argument. Overheard on a Saltmarsh turns desire for a string of beads into an insistent exchange between a goblin and a nymph. A Flower is Looking through the Ground gives a brief meeting between a child and a flower an uncertain sense of kinship. Man Carrying Bale watches a labourer’s movement closely, connecting the effort of one body with a much longer history of human work. Fantasy, childhood and physical observation sit beside one another in these contributions.

Later years

Monro continued to publish his own poetry, including Real Property in 1922 and The Earth for Sale in 1928. The bookshop moved to Great Russell Street in 1926. Letters preserved at the University of Kansas record responses to its reopening there, evidence of the literary network that had formed around the enterprise.

Financial strain and illness marked his later years. He died of tuberculosis in 1932, and Alida kept the shop open until 1935. She edited his Collected Poems, published in 1933 with a critical contribution by T. S. Eliot.