Article
Heiress makes $ 100 million donation to Poetry magazine
January 18, 2006
Last Friday, at a dinner party to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Poetry, Parisi announced that Lilly has bequeathed the magazine millions of dollars a year under a new estate plan covering thirty years. "Ruth Lilly has ensured our existence into perpetuity," the editor said. The exact amount of the gift – no strings attached – will fluctuate with the value of Eli Lilly stock, but the first payment, in January, should be about $10 million. In the course of the 30 years, her gift could be worth from $100 to 150 million.
It is "by far the largest single donation ever made to an institution devoted to poetry," Parisi told the New York Times. The gift could change the face of American poetry, critics and poets agree.
Poetry magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. It has published work by some of the most important poets of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. It pays a flat rate of $2 a line and has a monthly circulation of 12,000.
Ms Lilly, a publicity-shy philanthropist, has previously established the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and has sponsored two annual fellowships via Poetry magazine, as well as a professorship in poetry at Indiana University.
America’s most important poetry magazine has received a multimillion-dollar gift from the woman whose verse it repeatedly rejected.
Ruth Lilly, 87, heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, first started sending poems to the small but influential Poetry magazine in the early 70s, yet received only handwritten rejection notes for her efforts. Editor Joe Parisi thought her poems "good, but not up to the standards of a monthly known for running the works of titans of 20th century poetry, including William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas," writes the Chicago Tribune. However, Lilly "did not take personally" the rejections, her attorney told the Tribune.Last Friday, at a dinner party to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Poetry, Parisi announced that Lilly has bequeathed the magazine millions of dollars a year under a new estate plan covering thirty years. "Ruth Lilly has ensured our existence into perpetuity," the editor said. The exact amount of the gift – no strings attached – will fluctuate with the value of Eli Lilly stock, but the first payment, in January, should be about $10 million. In the course of the 30 years, her gift could be worth from $100 to 150 million.
It is "by far the largest single donation ever made to an institution devoted to poetry," Parisi told the New York Times. The gift could change the face of American poetry, critics and poets agree.
Poetry magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. It has published work by some of the most important poets of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. It pays a flat rate of $2 a line and has a monthly circulation of 12,000.
Ms Lilly, a publicity-shy philanthropist, has previously established the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and has sponsored two annual fellowships via Poetry magazine, as well as a professorship in poetry at Indiana University.
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