Poetry Bookshop Broadsides and Mass-Market Modernism

Abstract This article examines the cheaply mass-produced modernist poetry broadsides produced by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. It argues that these broadsides represented a dynamic—and remarkably successful—forgotten intervention into modern poetry publication, one which brought early modernist poetry into the homes and lives of ordinary readers. Neither antiquarian replicas nor limited-edition collectibles, the Poetry Bookshop broadsides, which flourished from 1913 to 1936, offer a new dimension to critical understandings of how modernist poetry circulated. The brightly coloured, cheap ‘Rhyme Sheets’ sold in their thousands, revealing an institution of modernist poetry deliberately seeking mass readership while also illuminating the complex temporal allegiances of early modernist aesthetics. At its close, the article offers a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Poetry Bookshop broadside ‘An Immorality’, to show how this distinctive print context could alter the experience of reading modernist poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.