Since its early days in 1889, Poet Lore has published world-famous poets and new writers side-by-side in its pages. Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke, two progressive young Shakespeare scholars, launched Poet Lore as a forum on “Shakespeare, Browning, and the Comparative Study of Literature” but soon sought out the original work of living writers. Porter and Clarke, who were life partners as well as co-editors, founded Poet Lore in Philadelphia and two years later moved to Boston, where the journal remained until 1976, when it was purchased by Heldref Publications in Washington, DC. Since 1987, Poet Lore has been a publication of The Writer’s Center.
Early issues of the magazine featured poetry by such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore, Frederic Mistral, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. The first English translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull first appeared in Poet Lore. Poems by Sara Teasdale, Emma Lazarus, and many other women poets appeared in Poet Lore’s pages when women’s voices were largely ignored in the publishing world, including work by Harriet Monroe, who went on to establish Poetry magazine in 1912.
Many renowned American poets published their early work (sometimes their very first poems) in Poet Lore—Kim Addonizio, David Baker, John Balaban, Carolyn Forché, Alice Fulton, Dana Gioia, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, R.T. Smith, and Mary Oliver among them.
More recently, we’ve published contemporary poets including Erika Meitner, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Tarfia Faizullah, Benjamin Garcia, Leah Umansky, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Aldo Amparán, Felicia Zamora, Nome Emeka Patrick, and many others.