Abstract for “Alice Corbin Henderson’s Poetry Networks in ‘The Great Southwest'” (forthcoming in College Literature, fall 2019)

This essay explores the promotional partnership of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse and the Santa Fe Railway in the early twentieth century. While much as been written about the Santa Fe Railway’s early twentieth century partnership with artists’ colonies in Taos and Santa Fe to advertise the region, this article reveals the connections between literary artists and railway executives. This mutually determining relationship has gone unnoticed due to the profitable illusion of the remote and disconnected Southwest. Through the isolated region, the railway promised a respite from modernity where Americans could discover their earliest and noble roots, while Poetry promised the region to be an ancient yet recently discovered resource for the “New Poetry.” These efforts eventually intersected, as Poetry edited and published corporate executives’ poetry, and relied on the railway to circulate her own and other modernists’ poetry in railway promotional literature.

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