Founded by poet and arts columnist Harriet Monroe, who built it into an influential publication, it is now published by the Poetry Foundation.

The magazine was founded in 1912[3][4] by Harriet Monroe, an author who was then working as an art critic for the Chicago Tribune.

She wrote at that time: "The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!

In other words, while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty."

Prufrock was brought to Monroe's attention by early contributor and foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound.

The magazine published the early works of H.D., Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore.

[1] Contributors have included William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, William Carlos Williams, Joyce Kilmer, Carl Sandburg, Charlotte Wilder, Robert Creeley,[6] Wallace Stevens,[7] Basil Bunting, Yone Noguchi, Carl Rakosi, Dorothy Richardson, Peter Viereck, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, E. E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Elsa Gidlow, and Tennessee Williams, Max Michelson[8] among others.

"[1] However, in the early years, East Coast newspapers made fun of the magazine, with one calling the idea "Poetry in Porkopolis".

Before announcing the gift, the magazine waited a year and reconfigured its governing board, which had been concerned with fund-raising.

[1] Wiman "expressed in print a stern preference for formal poems, and a disdain for what he calls 'broken-prose confessionalism' and 'the generic, self-obsessed free-verse poetry of the seventies and eighties", according to a New Yorker magazine article.

In 2005, Wiman wrote in an editorial: "Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional and dull.

That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair.

[16] Share stepped down in the summer of 2020, following a controversy over his decision to include a poem with racist language in an issue devoted to anti-racist poetry.

"If you look at drama in Shakespeare's day, or the novel in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time.