Poetry's fairy godmother

Joe Parisi publishes poems – only good ones, if he can help it. As long-serving editor of Poetry magazine, the American monthly based in Chicago, he has never been interested in fairy tales. Yet, now he is living one. The breadcrumbs that have sustained his journal for decades, have, in a stroke, been turned to gold.

This has not happened because of a surge in advertising or readership. Poetry, though its history is more than distinguished, has a readership of only 10,000. A fairy tale needs a fairy godmother, and in this instance, she is an ailing 87-year-old dowager from Indiana. The charming twist is that she herself used to submit poems to the magazine on occasion. And she was always, very politely, rejected.

Her name is Ruth Lilly, the reclusive and wealthy great-granddaughter of Colonel Eli Lilly, who founded the Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals giant. Last year, she informed the magazine – or rather her lawyer did – that she intended giving it a large bequest. Actually, the lawyer suggested that Mr Parisi sit down before he heard the rough figures involved. It will amount to $100m (around £63m), at the very least.

This is astonishing news indeed, for the magazine itself and for poets, aspiring and established, everywhere. Poetry magazine has always been important. Founded by an arts critic of the Chicago Tribune newspaper, Harriet Monroe, in 1912, it has published every month since without interruption. Often, it has showcased either the first or the very earliest works of some of the world's greatest poets, from Carl Sandberg, to T S Eliot and Wallace Stevens. No great 20th-century poet has been missed on its pages.

But money and verse are usually strangers and it is no surprise that Poetry has achieved this record with minimal resources. In fact, its longevity is a miracle of survival. It still pays just $2 a line to the poets it publishes, regardless of their standing, and has typically just $100 in its piggy bank. Its staff of four, including Mr Parisi, toil in a 600sq ft basement room beneath a Chicago library.

Now things promise to be slightly different. Thanks to Ms Lilly, Poetry is set to become one of the richest art foundations in the United States. By comparison, the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, with museums around the world, has assets of $219m. If you were to launch a high-gloss glamour magazine in the US today – and Poetry is anything but high-gloss – and wanted to guarantee that it stuck around for five years or more, the budget would probably be about $70m.

Poetry, said US poet laureate Billy Collins, has always been always the "poor little match girl of the arts. Well, the poor little match girl just hit the lottery." He added: "It's probably an unprecedented gift to a literary publication. It's a wonderful and good thing, unambiguously good, that Mrs Lilly has done."

"It's totally extraordinary," agrees Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker, who resigned to found Talk magazine, only to see it founder this year under financial duress. "It will turn Poetry into a real powerhouse in the poetry world. Where were you, Ms Lilly, when Talk was on the blink?"

Who knows where she was? Ms Lilly, who is childless, keeps a determinedly low profile. She is said to be worth more than $1bn. She did make the headlines a few years ago when she reportedly spent millions on trips to Europe and Hawaii for herself and an entourage of 30 people, including a retinue of 26 personal assistants. Even in Indianapolis, where she resides in great comfort, she is rarely spied. Never seeking publicity, she has given portions of her wealth over time to several institutions, mostly in her home state, including hospitals and public parks. She has also funded a programme to allow clergy to take time off from the pulpit to reflect on their faith. And, of course, there is her other abiding interest: poetry.

Thus, when Mr Parisi took that startling call last year, the name Ruth Lilly was hardly unknown to him. In 1986, she established the Ruth Lilly Poetry prize, whose value has grown over the years to $100,000 today. She has also sponsored two $15,000 poetry fellowships via the magazine, as well as professorship of poetry at Indiana University. If she suffered rejection in her own verses, clearly she never harboured any grudge to the art form. With her dollars, she has shown it nothing but love.

Poetry receives roughly 90,000 submissions from about 45 different countries every year and Mr Parisi estimates that about one per cent of them make it to publication. It is part of the magazine's daily drudge to sort through the tide of submissions that comes through the letterbox. It's not so hard, he explains, because, "there isn't that much that is absolutely first rate. If it is good, it pops out, believe me."

This weeding process does have its pitfalls, of course. Mr Parisi admits he has turned down work from Pulitzer Prize winners in his time. And he quite often sends back verses written by already famous poets, when he has considered them simply below par. "The famous ones are the easiest ones to turn down and often they write back two weeks later to thank me for saving them from their sins," he remarks lightly.

Poetry is not an institution that puts any store by a would-be contributor's status, either artistic or social, or financial standing. "Who you are doesn't matter to us, never has, nor how much money you have," Mr Parisi explains. Part of the magazine's mythology stems from its record of publishing the works of some of the greatest contemporary masters long before they became famous. Mr Parisi notes, for example, that Poetry took a first poem from the American poet John Ashbery when he was just 18 years old. It was giving space to John Koch back in the early Seventies. It can happen, of course, that a very rich person can also be a very fine poet. The best example would be James Merrill – Merrill as in Merrill Lynch, the brokerage – who started writing poems in the Forties. His financial background may even have impeded him, Mr Parisi argues, but he was able to overcome that. "Many people may have thought he was a dilettante, but what he sent to us was absolutely precocious and extraordinary."

Presumably, Ms Lilly understood all of this when she was trying her own luck with the magazine back in the Sixties and Seventies. She would send her poems though the post, signed Mrs Guernsey Van Riper Jr, which was her married name at that time. Mr Parisi distinctly remembers receiving some of her work. He didn't much care for her verses and he sent them back to her. That, you might think today, could so easily have been a fatal error. Yet, Mr Parisi always made a habit of writing a small note to the author of any poem he received – even it was just a short sentence scribbled on the bottom of a standard rejection form – to offer them thanks, give them encouragement and, hopefully, temper their disappointment.

The moral of this tale, therefore, may be that small acts of courtesy, performed when they are not strictly necessary, will bring their reward, perhaps even in this life. Maybe it was those handwritten notes that did it, or maybe not. We will never really know. Nor, probably, will Mr Parisi – he has never spoken directly to Ms Lilly and never really expects to. As another of the Poetry staff members noted, there is an almost "Dickensian element" to the whole affair – a mysterious, very wealthy, benefactor bestowing her largesse on the magazine from afar, allowing her lawyer to represent her in all respects.

This lawyer, Mr Ewbank, who, with buttoned-down discretion, has represented her and her family for many years, does confirm that she "did not take personally" those letters of rejection so many years ago. We also know that she asks her nurses to read longer poems to her still today – in her frailty, she cannot manage to read more than a few lines herself. Above all, we assume, she has given so generously to Poetry magazine, because she loves it and loves poems. "Her goal has been to try and build up the amount of public support and public notice of poetry," says Mr Ewbank.

The consensus of poets, at least, is that she chose her beneficiary wisely. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, has compared appearing on its pages to "being admitted to some surer order of the art". Perhaps, he is swayed by the fact that Poetry recently dedicated a double issue to poems from Ireland in English and Gaelic. It first published Mr Heaney in 1972. He joined names such as Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, e e cummings and countless other legends of verse whose words have graced the magazine.

Campbell McGrath, the American poet and recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim poetry prizes, also applauds the choice. "It's wonderful. Most poets live from paycheck to paycheck. But the paycheck is from another job; it's not from writing poetry. I hope that, as much as possible, Poetry will find a way to call up individual poets and say, 'You're not going to believe this, but we're going to give you money'."

But with so much money comes a mighty responsibility for a magazine that until now has consisted of just four warm – if admirably cerebral – bodies and a microwave. Managing the books is less of a challenge when your assets barely make it into three figures. Mr Parisi admits that when he first heard of the bequest and the numbers involved, he went into shock. "I was speechless," he recalls. "It's very difficult to get your head round numbers that are so big." It didn't help that the bequest comes in a very complicated package ensuring that it will be paid in instalments from different sources over a period of 30 years. Its final value will depend on the performance over time of Eli Lilly stock. While it is safe to say the magazine is looking at about $100m, it could end up being worth closer to $150m.

Among those who are worried lest the magazine squanders the bequest is Mr Ewbank himself. "There are people who can snatch defeat from the jaw of victory," he commented. "But assuming they have a good investment committee and controls, all they need to be is prudent and conservative and this will provide them with the base they need."

Mr Parisi will not be alone in the extraordinary project. The magazine is overseen by the Modern Poetry Association and a board of trustees. First it must change its tax status to become a private foundation. Its president, Deborah Cummings, insists that the magazine will remain as "our crown jewel". And as a first priority, it will move to a new, definitely more spacious, home of its own in Chicago, large enough also to house a collection of works. Next, the journal will start to pay poets rather more than $2 a line. Beyond that, the association means to develop various educational programmes for poetry and establish seminars to encourage teachers to give classes to young students in contemporary poetry across America. And it will offer new fellowships and grants.

"The dream of Harriet Monroe was to create an independent magazine that would create a larger audience of poetry. And now another woman, Ruth Lilly, has made it possible into perpetuity," says Mr Parisi. He has no plans to change the magazine's format – no photographs or "gimmicks" – nor would he say if he had designs on a more sophisticated microwave. "But I have told everyone, when we move, it will be mandatory for every office to have its own espresso machine." Small luxuries.