Savior of Poetry Magazine

In her Chicago Tribune Obituary, the headline writer focused on Julia Lecour Bowe’s central role in the survival of Poetry Magazine. This was was worthy mission because Poetry Magazine in the first decade after its founding in Chicago in 1912 became in the words of Encyclopaedia Britannca, “…the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world.” After the magazine’s founder and editor Harriet Monroe died in Peru in 1936, Julia and her husband Judge Augustine Bowe, Chief Justice of Chicago’s Municipal Court, raised funds over the next decades that helped keep this unique literary journal alive. The vehicle for this rescue mission was the Modern Poetry Association, which Julia headed.