How a Chicago editor set T.S. Eliot on the path to a Nobel Prize

CHICAGO — In the autumn of 1914, Harriet Monroe prepared a manuscript for the typesetters of Poetry, a magazine she edited in what had been the front room of a mansion at 543 N. Cass St. in Chicago. Since then, the street has been renamed Wabash and its mansions replaced by high-rises, even as the verses Monroe marked up in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” became immortal.

In her memoirs, Monroe suggested she could have guessed that they were so fated.

She wrote in “A Poet’s Life.”:

“When ‘Prufrock’ reached us via our Foreign Correspondent, its opening lines—

Let us go then, you and I,