A HUNDRED MILLION.(bequest to Poetry magazine by Ruth Lilly)

Last week's news that Ruth Lilly, the eighty-seven-year-old heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, had bequeathed a hundred million dollars to the magazine Poetry, a modest Chicago monthly, was greeted by a range of reactions (glee, befuddlement, envy, disdain) that had in common one underlying article of belief: that it was a hell of a lot of money. Certainly, to most poets (excluding a few popular songwriters and a boxer or two) any sum with eight zeros in it is otherworldly, Ozymandian. The poet Kurt Brown said last week that every poet he had talked to had paused before speaking the number. "People just love to say that figure: one hundred million dollars," he said (employing a brief caesura himself). "I was talking to Barry Lopez last night, and he said, 'That's probably more money than poetry has gotten, in total, since Homer.' "

Poetry is highly esteemed. In its ninety years of existence, it has published T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore, among many others, and it remains one of the best venues for verse in the land. But it has just four employees. Its offices occupy six hundred square feet. Its annual budget is only six hundred thousand dollars. It pays contributors two dollars a line, which adds up to twenty-eight dollars for a sonnet, as the Times pointed out (or, as the Times did not point out, ten bucks for a limerick). In other words, Poetry is not built to squander that kind of money, and so it will need to reinvent itself, or, at the very least, expand its field of operations. Fellowships, writers' colonies, big awards, educational programs: these might eat up a few million. But what about the rest of it? "They could get very slick," the poet James Tate said. "Beautiful covers, beautiful offices, new hairdos for everyone." The mind reels: you could buy ten thousand acres in, say, northern Michigan, and let a bunch of poets run wild--a Bohemian Grove for real bohemians. You could ...