Which American poetry society received a $200 million bequest from a widow, about 3-5 years ago?

Answer 1

Perhaps you are remembering the 2002 bequest of $100 million to Poetry Foundation by Ruth Lilly, a widow and heir of the family associated with Eli Lilly & Co. pharmaceuticals. Lilly had earlier, in 1986, established the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, also through the Poetry Foundation. [1]

Both the prize and the more recent grant are managed by the foundation that publishes the well-known review Poetry [magazine], published in Chicago since 1912 when it was founded by Harriet Monroe. Early on, it became the publication that introduced to American readers the work of such writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H. D., William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg, among others. The magazine was also instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. [2]

For an astute, but biting, analysis of the meaning of the 2002 Lilly bequest, you should read "Free (Market) Verse" by Steve Evans in The Baffler 17 (2006), a piece that deals with the political and critical implications of the bequest and reveals its relationship to corporate America and Republican politics. [3] It also questions the agendas of such contemporary poet/critics as Edward Hirsch, Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser and (indirectly) Billy Collins, who have spoken up on behalf of "traditional" and "accessible" poetry over modernist and post-modernist tendencies.

(By the way, I don't agree with much of what the article says, and I have a great deal of admiration for Hirsch and his colleagues, but I do find the political implications questionable, to say the very least, and the timing of the bequest suspiciously coincidental.)

Answer 2

the one with the big building