Poetry Society of America

The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets, editors, and artists including Witter Bynner. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the society have included such renowned writers as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. Current members include John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Molly Peacock, Billy Collins and James Tate.

In 1910, the Poetry Society of America held its first official meeting in the National Arts Club in Manhattan, which is still home to the organization today. Jesse Rittenhouse, a founding member and Secretary of the PSA, documented the founding of the Poetry Society of America in her autobiography My House of Life writing "It was not, however, to be an organization in the formal sense of the word, but founded upon the salon idea, a place where poets would gather to read and discuss their work and that of their contemporaries, the group to be united largely through the hospitality of our hosts at whose apartments it was proposed we should continue to meet...When, after much enthusiastic speech-making, a committee was appointed to retire and discuss the details, I had no hesitancy in saying—though at the risk of seeming ungrateful to our hosts—that it was much too big an idea to be narrowed down to a social function, into which it would inevitably deteriorate, and if the Society were developed at all, it ought to be along national lines, and should meet in a public rather than a private place."

Within the first few years, poets such as Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats regularly attended meetings.

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