Poetry of Harold Munro, The

Harold Edward Munro was born on the 14th of March 1879 at 137 chaussée de Charleroi, Saint-Gilles, Brussels. He was educated at Radley College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. On 2nd December 1903 in Ireland Munro married Dorothy Elizabeth Browne. Unfortunately the marriage was not to last and they separated in 1908. In 1906 his first collection of poetry, Poems, was published. Many volumes followed but Munro was never regarded as highly as his contemporaries. Perhaps his forays into magazines, editing and publishing and his bookshop has unfairly diminished his poetic contribution. In 1912 he became the editor of the influential magazine, The Poetry Review, but was ousted after a year. In 1913 he founded the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. From here he would also publish new volumes of poetry by himself and other writers. With Edward Marsh he published annual volumes of Georgian Poetry in the process establishing it as a very fine poetry movement. Munro was often tortured by his sexuality and although he married twice some of his poems reveal his truer feelings. As the Great War smothered Europe with its monstrous destruction of a generation, the War Poets spoke. Munro himself wrote only a few war poems but his ‘Youth in Arms’ quartet, written in the first months of the carnage, was an early attempt to explore the human psychology of soldiering and to understand how ungrudgingly youth dies. After the war Munro continued his efforts with the Poetry Bookshop and expanded into several new projects. He was searching both as a writer, and as a publisher, for the middle ground that was both culturally exciting and commercially worthwhile. In his later years his mood darkened, his drinking escalated and became a real problem. Sadly amongst the stresses and the strains he contracted tuberculosis. Harold Edward Munro died on the 16th March 1932 aged 53. He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium. It was later remarked of him ‘Perhaps no one did more for the advancement of twentieth-century poetry’.