The Lyric Year

The Lyric Year
Name	The Lyric Year
Established	1912
Genre	Poetry competition
Country	United States
Founder	Arthur Guiterman
Sponsor	Poetry magazine

The Lyric Year was an annual American poetry competition and anthology series founded in the early 20th century that sought to recognize and publish outstanding lyric poems. Organized in conjunction with periodicals, literary societies, and cultural institutions, it attracted submissions from established and emerging poets across the United States and Europe, shaping careers and influencing poetic trends.

Overview

The competition and its associated anthology connected figures associated with Poetry (magazine), Scribner's Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation (U.S. magazine), Poets' Club, Bohemian Club (San Francisco), Knickerbocker Club, and institutions such as Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Smith College, Barnard College, Radcliffe College, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Cornell University, Rutgers University, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, Dartmouth College, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, and Mount Holyoke College. Entrants, judges, and publishers included members of the Poetry Society of America, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Phi Beta Kappa, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Royal Society of Literature, and regional clubs such as the Saturday Club (Boston) and the Cornhill Club.

History and Development

The Lyric Year emerged during a period shaped by movements and events like Modernism, Victorian era, the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, the lead-up to World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the effects of World War II, and the cultural shifts of the Great Depression. Prominent literary figures and editors from entities such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Hilda Doolittle, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Stephen Vincent Benét, Vachel Lindsay, Rudyard Kipling, Conrad Aiken, E. E. Cummings, Edwin Arlington Robinson, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Wilbur Scoville, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, and editors from Vogue (magazine), Vanity Fair (magazine), The Saturday Review, and The Bookman (New York) engaged with or commented on its selections. Early sponsors included philanthropists and collectors associated with the American Fund for the Restoration of the White House, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and patrons linked to Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and regional theaters like Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

Subsequent decades saw shifts influenced by publications such as Modern Poetry in England and America, anthologies from Faber and Faber, awards like the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, and competitions run by The Poetry Society (UK). The Lyric Year's editorial practices responded to debates exemplified by public exchanges involving Alfred Noyes, Laura Riding, Hugh Kenner, Harold Bloom, Yvor Winters, and critics from The New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Observer (UK).

Participants and Eligibility

Submission guidelines attracted poets affiliated with magazines, presses, and institutions including Macmillan Publishers, Houghton Mifflin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Knopf, Random House, Little, Brown and Company, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Scribner, Longmans, Green, Chatto & Windus, Methuen Publishing, and smaller presses like Folio Society and New Directions Publishing. Entrants ranged from laureates and fellows such as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, United States Poet Laureate, Yaddo fellows, MacArthur Fellows Program recipients, Guggenheim Fellowship awardees, Fulbright Program scholars, Rockefeller Fellows, and winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Bram Stoker Award, and the National Book Award. Participants included poets connected to movements and groups like the Imagists, Harlem Renaissance, Beat Generation, Confessional poetry, New Criticism, Black Mountain poets, Objectivists, Language poets, and regional cohorts centered on San Francisco Renaissance, Chicago Renaissance, New York School, Providence poets and associated with venues like St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

Eligibility typically required original, previously unpublished lyric poems not under contract with presses like The Dial (literary magazine), nor under consideration by organizations such as Poetry Society of America contests, National Poetry Series, Poets & Writers Magazine programs, Academy of American Poets fellowships, or institutional series from London Review of Books affiliates.

Judging, Awards, and Recognition

Judges were often editors and poets from institutions including HarperCollins, The New Republic, Partisan Review, New Directions Publishing, Faber and Faber, The Criterion, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Odyssey (magazine), Hearth & Home and academies like American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Awards mirrored prestige of prizes like the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and regional honors such as the California Book Awards. Recognition included publication in anthologies alongside poets who had received Nobel Prize in Literature, Booker Prize, National Medal of Arts, and invitations to festivals like Edinburgh International Festival, Cheltenham Festival, Hay Festival, Library of Congress readings, residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and lectureships at Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Impact and Legacy

The Lyric Year influenced careers of poets who later appeared in academic curricula at Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, Columbia University, University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Penguin Books, Norton Anthology of Poetry, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, and the Routledge Classics series. Its selections informed critical debates involving scholars from Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University Press, and critics writing for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation (U.S. magazine), London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry (magazine). Alumni of the competition later held positions in bodies such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, served as United States Poet Laureate, and received honors including the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award.

The anthology series and contest model contributed to the formation of other competitions run by organizations like Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, National Endowment for the Arts, British Council, and regional arts councils, reinforcing networks among presses, journals, festivals, and universities and leaving a record in special collections at repositories including the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Houghton Library, Bodleian Library, British Library, and university archives.

Category:American poetry competitions