Monro, Harold Edward

(1879-1932)

   Born in Belgium, the son of a Scottish civil engineer, he was educated at Radley College, Oxfordshire, then graduated in medieval and modern languages from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1901. He passed the fist part of his law exams, but gave up law in 1903 to marry. Thereafter he was a poultry farmer in Ireland, a publisher in Surrey, and a mill-owner in Switzerland. On the outbreak of World War I he became an officer in an antiaircraft battery, but was later drafted for duty in the War Office. In 1913 he founded the Poetry Bookshop in London and started a series of readings by poets of their own works or of their favorite poets, which continued up to the time of his death. He published Sir Edward Marsh's five volumes of Georgian Poetry (1911-1922) and various other volumes of poetry. Crippled by increasing ill health and pain in his last two years of his life, he died at Broadstairs, Kent. Some of his poems: "Midnight Lamentation," "Milk for the Cat," "Officers' Mess," "Strange Meetings," "The Bird at Dawn," "The Nightingale Near the House," "Youth in Arms."

   Sources: 101 Favorite Cat Poems. Sara L. Whittier, ed. Contemporary Books, 1991. British Poetry 1880-1920: Edwardian Voices. Paul L. Wiley and Harold Orel, eds. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Biography of Harold Munro (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0833767.html). Modern British Poetry. 7th rev. ed. Louis Untermeyer, ed. Harcourt, Brace, 1962. Strange Meetings by Monro, Harold. The Poetry Bookshop, 1921. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. William Butler Yeats, ed. Oxford University Press, 1936. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.