Harold Monro

His paternal grandfather, Dr Henry Munro FRCP MD, was a surgeon, born at Gower St, Bloomsbury, in 1817.

In 1913, he founded the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury,[3] where he published new collections at his own expense and sometimes made a profit, while providing a welcoming environment for readers and poets.

[5] Initially, he had an ally in Monro,[6] who devoted the September 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama to Futurism, praising Marinetti in a long editorial.

[7] 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.

At their green official baize They debated all the night Plans for your adventurous days Which you followed with delight, Youth in all your wanderings, David of a thousand slings.

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.

[9] 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.

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.

According to the English literary historian Dominic Hibberd, "By now Monro was a disappointed man, appalled at the state of Europe and feeling forgotten by the poets he had helped.

He died on 16 March 1932, aged 53, at the Cliff Combe Nursing Home, Broadstairs, Kent, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on the 19th.

"[1] On Monday, 4 August 2014, a service was held at Westminster Abbey as "A Solemn Commemoration on the Centenary of the Outbreak of the First World War", HRH Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, representing HM the Queen.

After a reading from St John's Gospel, the choir gave the first performance of a new composition by David Matthews,[10] a pupil of Benjamin Britten, setting a bitter, disillusioned 1914 poem by Harold Monro, "To what God shall we chant our songs of battle?"

Poets included in Twentieth Century Poetry, an anthology chosen by Harold Monro, 1933 edition: Lascelles Abercrombie, Richard Aldington, John Alford, A. C. Benson, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, W. S. Blunt, Gordon Bottomley, Robert Bridges, Rupert Brooke, Samuel "Erewhon" Butler, Roy Campbell, G. K. Chesterton, Richard Church, Padraic Colum, A. E. Coppard, Frances Cornford, John Davidson, W. H. Davies, Jeffery Day, Walter de la Mare, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Drinkwater, Helen Parry Eden, T. S. Eliot, Vivian Locke Ellis, Michael Field, J. E. Flecker, F. S. Flint, John Freeman, Stella Gibbons, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, H. D., Philip Henderson, Maurice Hewlett, Ralph Hodgson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Ford Madox Hueffer, T. E. Hulme, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Masefield, R. A. K. Mason, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, Viola Meynell, Harold Monro, T. Sturge Moore, Edwin Muir, Henry Newbolt, Robert Nichols, Alfred Noyes, Wilfred Owen, J. D. C. Pellow, H. D. C. Pepler, Eden Phillpotts, Ezra Pound, Peter Quennell, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Geoffrey Scott, Edward Shanks, Fredegond Shove, Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, Stephen Spender, J. C. Squire, James Stephens, Edward Thomas, W. J. Turner, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Max Weber, Anna Wickham, Humbert Wolfe, William Butler Yeats