There might be a revolution going on in American poetry, but like most things that happen in American poetry, nobody really knows about it. It won’t make CNN, and definitely not Newsweek, but this spring, after the publication of Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry, Louise Glück, Adjunct Professor of English and the Rosencranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale, will step down, after nearly a decade, as the judge of the Yale Younger Series of Poets.

It’s really not surprising that this isn’t a big deal. It’s poetry, which no one reads anyway, and it’s a first-book competition, so none of the winners are famous. It doesn’t come as a shock for anyone with a subscription to Publisher’s Weekly—or any other magazine, for that matter—to hear that poetry is, generally, no longer news in American culture.

And yet the fact is that an astonishing number of poets who went on to great prominence and lasting influence began their careers as Yale Younger Poets. Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, James Tate, Jack Gilbert, Robert Hass—any “Who’s Who” of American poetry over the past century would have to mention at least a handful of the contest’s winners. That statistic makes it a little surprising that, in discussions of Yale’s influence on American society, the conversation is bound to include plenty of presidents and Supreme Court justices but not one mention of the country’s oldest literary contest, which has for almost a hundred years predicted with rather stunning accuracy future stars of American letters.

That’s a pretty stiff vote of confidence for any writer selected for the series, though for 2007’s winning poet Fady Joudah, confidence isn’t a guarantee of success: “Many more Yale winners came to little attention than those who went on to stamp their mark on American poetry.” Still, the series has undoubtedly “debuted many important poets,” according to English professor Amy Hungerford. That high-carat, if not impeccable, track record is the cornerstone of the contest’s reputation, and it can bring a great deal of critical attention to the poets selected. Unknown poets who win the contest find themselves, in one swoop, endorsed by a well-known poet and a cultural institution, published by a successful university press, and reviewed in national newspapers. Or, at least, they would be, if national newspapers published reviews of poetry books anymore.

The publishing industry has been taking a beating for years now, and the reasons for its decline—a drop in interest in reading as a pastime, the rise of e-readers, the recession, you pick ‘em—are well known. The problems are particularly dire in poetry departments of most publishers—that is, for those that still have them. A 2008 National Endowment for the Arts study found readership of poetry halved over the past 16 years, and most books not written by the handful of famous poets barely recoup publishers’ expenses. Still, in a decade that has seen a number of university presses discontinue their poetry series, Yale’s has somehow held on, and even done one better: Over the past ten years the series has gained increasing cultural relevance and solidified its position as America’s preeminent prize for unpublished poets.

While the Younger Poets series has retained great prestige, that prominence doesn’t always directly translate into success. At his Master’s Tea at Yale on Nov. 4, Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, said that while the series remains one of the most important competitions in American poetry, winning it doesn’t necessarily mean wider publication for selected writers. As an example, he offered the series’ winning book from 2006, Richard Siken’s Crush—“I remember thinking, ‘We have got to be publishing this guy.’ But we didn’t. And we haven’t.”

This dismal market has, some say, driven poetry into the academic closet, forcing poets to bounce around getting advanced degrees in order to teach instead of simply writing. According to this argument, the isolation of poetry into a purely collegiate milieu results in a dilution of talent and an enforced uniformity of style that could leach American literature of its power. Poets who espouse this position have done so with incredible virulence: Philip Levine, in his 1994 book The Bread of Time, wrote,“Today, anyone can become a poet: All he or she has to do is travel to the nearest college and enroll in ‘Beginning Poetry Writing’and ‘Semi-Advanced Poetry Writing,’ all the way to ‘Masterwork Poetry Writing,’ “in which course one completes her epic on the sacking of Yale or his sonnet cycle on the paintings of Edward Hopper, or their elegies in a city dumpster, and thus earns not only an M.F.A. but a crown of plastic laurel leaves.” Jim Behrle gave a fire-breathing talk on the state of American poetry at St. Mark’s Poetry Project this past January that can best be summed up by its title: “24/7 Relentless Careerism.” This kind of critique, which has been gaining ground among contemporary poets, begs the question: Are contests like the Yale Younger Poets doing more harm than good? Should poetry be cut off from its academic crutches? Should good poetry, as Stein also argued, “have to fight for itself” to get readers and sales?

Carl Phillips, the current judge of the series, doesn’t think that’s foolproof either: “Originality challenges imagination, and most readers read for escape, not for challenge, as far as I can tell. So it makes sense that poetry—truly original, challenging poetry—would be unlikely to be part of mainstream American culture. I myself am pleased to reside at the edges.” Jennifer Banks, the editor of the series at the Yale press, agrees: “Many of our most beloved poets were never published in their lifetime—or published poorly—because they were not in step with the market. The market can be clarifying at times but it doesn’t always have the best tastes and shouldn’t be granted the role of trustworthy cultural critic. It misses a lot.”

Throughout its history, the series has strived—at times struggled—to find what the marketplace might otherwise miss, work that could be lost. In that sense, the commercial woes of poetry publishing make contests like the series all the more important to encourage those whose artistic sensibilities “reside at the edges” of American taste.

The Yale Series of Younger Poets began in 1919, a year that was, more than anything else, the first year after the War. It was a year of unrest and revolution—the Spartacist uprising began in Germany, strikes broke out from Scotland to the Seine, and even the good people of Cleveland took to the streets in riots that killed two. But it was also a year that saw people taking on the difficult work of rebuilding the ruins of Western culture—the Bauhaus school began planning its modernist utopia, the Prohibitionists made sober judgment into a federal law, and in New Haven, Conn., three middle-aged critics decided that the young Yale men returning to their studies from scenes of unimaginable horror should be encouraged to write and publish poetry.

George Parmly and Clarence Day, two brothers who had graduated from Yale in 1896 and 1897 respectively, began the series as an American response to a similar collection of young poets published at Oxford. Every volume opened with an epigraph declaring the series’ intention to publish the work of “young men and women” whose verse “seems to give the fairest promise for the future of American poetry.”

In its early years, the series was especially “young.” Most of the first poets published were in their early twenties, some still undergraduates—a fact perhaps best illustrated by the dedication of almost every volume to the poet’s parents. Everything was about the war; six of the first seven poets had served, and an eighth, the series’ first woman, had worked as a nurse in France. Even the series’ blue covers reminded many readers of French infantry uniforms. Though the war had touched most of these first poets, their poetry didn’t show it; George Bradley, the 1986 Younger Poet and editor of the series’ first anthology, didn’t pull punches describing these first volumes: “The early Yale poets were incapable of effectively communicating their wartime experience, because in art, skill must precede meaning, and skill was what they lacked.”

The low caliber of the winners finally changed with the tenure of Stephen Vincent Benét as judge, who took over the series in 1933. By that time, Benét was already a well-known literary figure, and he used those connections wisely, sending letters to every editor he knew in an attempt to drum up excellent young poets to submit their work. He got results, and quickly—the first two books he chose were by James Agee and Muriel Rukeyser, both of whom became well-known writers. His last selection, the series’ first black author, Margaret Walker, was perhaps his most astute—though rejected by the series four times before it was eventually published, Walker’s manuscript, For My People, sold over five thousand copies (making her the Yale Press’ best-selling poet for decades) and remains widely studied today.

Benét’s selections finally put the series on the map. The higher quality submissions Benét was able to amass, combined with the judge’s own taste for grounded and fiercely imagined work, made the series a taste-making institution in American poetry for the first time. Benét’s judgments married the popular with the good, and as a result the series quickly became a widely reviewed and well-respected prize whose winners were guaranteed attention in the literary community. One editor at The Atlantic trusted Benét and the series so much that in 1939 he wrote to request material for publication, sight-unseen.

W.H. Auden took over the judging of the series in 1947, and did more than any judge before or since to cement the series’ reputation as the most important distinction an unpublished American poet could receive. The prickly, uncompromising poet refused to choose a winner twice in thirteen years—the longest tenure of any judge of the series—and the selections he did make yielded an astonishing array of luminaries, including Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and John Ashbery. The selection of Ashbery’s unstintingly difficult Some Trees in 1955 was contentious—the Press’ in-house reader, after working his way through the manuscript, declared in a company-wide memo, “Needless to say, I bow out of future work on the Y.S.Y.P.” Auden was, characteristically, unperturbed, and went on to pick a trifecta of successful, admirable poets with his last three selections as judge—James Wright, John Hollander, and William Dickey.

In 1969, Stanley Kunitz took the reins of the series to become another of its most influential judges. With his first selection, Michael Casey’s Obscenities, a book of terse, brutal, Vietnam-inspired poems, the series had finally come full circle from the stilted, formal war poems of its first volumes. This book also set the tone for the rest of Kunitz’ winners—shocking, often political, and surprisingly popular. Obscenities sold 117,500 copies, dwarfing the number of any of the series’ previous bestsellers. Kunitz continued to make controversial selections that brought new readers to the series, from the political pastorals of Robert Hass’ Field Guide (in which Washington, D.C. has “more lies than cherry blossoms”) to the lesbian eroticism of Olga Broumas’ Beginning with O.

After Kunitz stepped down, the series saw a series of short-term editors, before finally settling on W.S. Merwin, a former series poet himself, in 1998. That year, following in his selector Auden’s grumpy elder-statesman-footsteps, Merwin refused to choose a winner. The next five years, however, found him better disposed toward the submissions, and he chose several poets who have become mainstays of the contemporary poetry landscape.

Glück was named Merwin’s successor when

he resigned from the series in 2003. Like her predecessor (and, for that matter, Carl Phillips) Glück was a choice who brought about as much wattage to the position as any contemporary American poets could—she was named Poet Laureate in 2003, and has won both the Bollingen and a Pulitzer, as well as a handful of Guggenheim fellowships. It is perhaps a testament to the Yale Younger Poets’ prominence that her selection as its judge is often named among those awards as one of her accomplishments. Her time at the helm of the series has seen the publication of some stellar, and widely lauded, books—so much so that, as she jokes, her tenure could have started to seem like “an imperial city—American Poetry run by me. And I didn’t want that.” Still, Glück thinks that the series itself has regained its full stature—“I think I’m very proud of the degree to which it’s become important again. I think the books over the last eight years have been dazzling.”

If they are, it’s in some part at least due to her effort, in both choosing and improving manuscripts. Like several (though not all) of the series’ former judges, Glück has been a strong factor in the editing process with winning writers, to varying degrees: “I was intensely involved with the editing, some books more than others. Some of those books were completely different when they were accepted and far more powerful when they were published.” Several of Glück’s selected poets agree with this assessment: “Interacting with Louise Glück has affected me personally in a very transformative way,” said Katherine Larson, this year’s winner. Arda Collins, whose book This is Daylight won in 2008, valued Glück’s editing equally highly: “Working with Louise Glück is one of the best things about this award. I feel grateful to know her, as a poet and a friend.”

That personal connection forged between the series’ judge and the authors selected is, according to Glück, essential to the value of the series, and sets it apart from prizes judged by panel or committee: “In the main, most poets and prose writers, they’re going to have passionate convictions about what’s good, and they won’t agree, and when you put them in a position of making a decision together, you’re going to get tepid work.” Of course, that puts the judging individual under a great deal of pressure, not only to select the right manuscript but to bring it to maturity and present it properly as well—most concretely by writing the foreword for every book selected.

The responsibility to write the forewords has been a contentious one since the early days of the contest. Auden was particularly incensed by it, writing to the Press (with his typical cattiness), “These introductions always sound awful, and the whole idea that a new poet should be introduced by an older one as if he were a debutante, or a new face cream, is deplorable and false.” Glück seems to have found the duty, if not as unnecessary, quite as much of a nuisance: “I hated doing the forewords, which produced enormous anxiety and terror that I wouldn’t be equal to the job.” That worry seems to have been unfounded; like Auden’s, Glück’s forewords for the series are as much aesthetic manifestos as they are explications of another’s work—in her introduction to Crush, probably the most well-received of all her selections for the series, Glück opined, “In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos.” Glück’s forewords are rife with such small profundities, which makes it little wonder that writing them “took up always the whole of summer.”

Why would a poet who is still producing critically-acclaimed work herself, become so deeply involved in the trials of another poet’s book, another’s career, another’s voice? It is, Glück insists, not a matter of philanthropy. “People would thank me for my generosity and I would think, you know, ‘I’m a bloodsucker.’ It’s not generosity. It sustains me, it’s my food and drink. I’m learning how minds work that seem to me brilliant and utterly different from mine,” she said of working with the poets. Beyond that, it was often simply exciting: “I really loved opening the boxes, I really loved peeking through the manuscripts looking for gold. And I kept finding it.”

That search for buried treasure is, in the end, the most pressing reason for the series’ continued existence. Art doesn’t stop, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets, with its explicit associations of the old guard bestowing its blessing on the new, is a perfect example of that kind of continuous motion. Of course, to a certain extent, no contest can claim perfect authority, because no one can ever predict with certainty which work will prove lasting. But according to Fady Joudah, that’s only for the best:“The Emily Dickinsons of our age are, by definition, unknown. And that may be poetry’s best gift to its own future.”