“Many Little Wildernesses”: Harriet Monroe, <i>Poetry</i> , and the Reader as Tourist

ABSTRACT This article seeks to understand readerly experiences of the little magazine Poetry in the context of Harriet Monroe’s commitment to the American wilderness, combining insights from both periodical studies and ecocriticism. Reader engagement with magazines is arguably more fleeting than with books and invites comparison with the temporary vacations to the wilderness that Monroe advocates in several of her editorials. Little magazines have been described as having a fragmenting or even violently disruptive effect on modernist literature and its readers but, as this article argues, considering the importance of tourism in relation to Poetry challenges this point of view.