Identity area
Type of entity
Corporate body
Authorized form of name
Poem of the Month Club
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
The Poem of the Month Club was founded in 1970 by Jack H. Clark and Winston Fletcher. The mission of the club was to publish a "substantial and characteristic" original poem by a leading British poet. Among the poets published by the club were W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stevie Smith. The poems were printed on fine quality broadsides, suitable for framing, and signed by the author.
Roy Fuller, poet and Professor of at Oxford, and Cecil Day-Lewis, poet laureate, were the club's professional advisors who helped to solicit and select poems for publication. From 1970-1977 the club published four folios of twelve poems each. (The last two poems of the fourth folio were not published until 1977, although the folio is dated 1973-1974.) The Poem of the Month Club ended in 1977, a victim of declining interest and increased difficulty in finding new material.