Harold Monro

"Troubled by his complex sexuality and the fear of death, Harold Monro was a tormented figure whose aim was to serve the cause of poetry. Dominic Hibberd's revealing and beautifully written book will help rescue Monro from the graveyard of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier, twice-married yet homosexual, Monro probably did more than anyone for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and yet his reward has been near-oblivion. This first-ever biography, meticulously researched and drawing on much unpublished material, shows how his famous Poetry Bookshop and associated publishing enterprises grew from the Utopian ideas of H. G. Wells and other prophets, and from experience of freethinking communes abroad.". "Monro aimed to find and unite the poets of the future. At the Bookshop, as in his own highly individual poetry, he was non-partisan, befriending, among many others, T. S. Eliot, whose Criterion Club met regularly above the shop; Ezra Pound and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham. Monro was the founding editor of three leading periodicals, including The Poetry Review, and was responsible for the ground-breaking anthology Georgian Poetry."--BOOK JACKET.