Гарольд Монро: Поэт и книготорговец Bloomsbury

English poet

Harold Edward Monro (14 March 1879 – 16 March 1932) was an English poet born in Brussels, Belgium. As the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London, he helped many poets to bring their work before the public.

Monro was born at 137 chaussée de Charleroi, Saint Gilles/St Gillis, Brussels, on 14 March 1879, as the youngest of three surviving children of Edward William Monro (1848–1889), civil engineer, and his wife and first cousin, Arabel Sophia (1849–1926), daughter of Peter John Margary, also a civil engineer. Monro's father was born at Marylebone and died aged 41 when Monro was only nine years old. This loss may have influenced his character as a poet. The Monro family was well established in Bloomsbury. His paternal grandfather, Dr Henry Munro FRCP MD, was a surgeon, born at Gower St, Bloomsbury, in 1817. Monro was educated at Radley College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His first collection of poetry was published in 1906. He also edited a poetry magazine, The Poetry Review, which became influential. In 1913, he founded the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury, where he published new collections at his own expense and sometimes made a profit, while providing a welcoming environment for readers and poets. Several poets, including Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, lodged in the rooms above the shop. Monro and the Poetry Bookshop were also involved with Edward Marsh in publishing the Georgian Poetry series. Monro also founded and edited Poetry and Drama. Between 1910 and 1914, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who had established Italian Futurism with the publication of the first Futurist manifesto in 1909, gave readings and lectures in London with a view to establishing an English Futurism. Initially, he had an ally in Monro, who devoted the September 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama to Futurism, praising Marinetti in a long editorial. Marinetti's campaign both threatened and influenced Ezra Pound, who founded his own literary movement, Imagism, and wrote manifestos to publicize it while attacking Futurism. Vorticism was the second London literary movement both opposing and reflecting Marinetti's, with Pound as a major collaborator. though this was not published by the Poetry Bookshop. He also founded The Chapbook (1919–1925, his third journal after The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama, 1913–1914), which was not commercially viable, but contained some of his best work as a poet. His intention was to find "cultural middle ground" between modernism and the more traditional work exemplified by the Georgians. In this Monro took a broad view of the sphere of poetry, devoting whole numbers to children's rhymes and to songs by Walter de la Mare complete with scores.

The young Monro was raised together with his sister Mary (died 1921) by their widowed mother, who remarried in 1910 to Sir Daniel Fulthorpe Gooch (1829–1926). Monro's stepbrother Lancelot Daniel Edward Gooch, a midshipman on HMS Implacable, died a fortnight after his 18th birthday in Greece, on 4 October 1915. On 2 December 1903 in Eastbourne, Monro married Dorothy Elizabeth Browne. Their son Nigel Monro (1904–1951) was born in Ireland, where Harold was working as a land agent for a family friend. However, the marriage was not to last and in 1908, the couple separated. The son followed Monro family medical tradition and practised as a surgeon. In March 1913 Monro met Alida Klemantaski, 17 years his junior, from Hampstead, who also had a passion for poetry and had set herself goals of becoming a doctor or rescuing prostitutes from their predicament. Monro instead persuaded her that by working in the Poetry Bookshop, she would be achieving just as much for society. They were married in 1920. Alida's brother Louis Klemantaski, a promising young poet and musical editor died at the Somme in 1916. It is said that Alida had a greater influence than anyone on the development of Monro's own poetry.