Troubled by his complex sexuality, Monro was a tormented soul whose aim
was to serve the cause of poetry. Hibberd's revealing and
beautifully-written biography will help rescue Monro from the graveyard
of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet
and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier,
twice-married yet homosexual, Harold Monro probably did more than anyone
for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and
yet his reward has been near oblivion. Aiming to encourage the poets of
the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and
the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist;
Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte
Mew and Amma Wickham.