The heiress and philanthropist Ruth Lilly gave an estimated $100 million (£65 million) to Poetry magazine, a US periodical dedicated to the promotion of poetic literature and the publication of new American verse. As well as underpinning the financial security of the magazine, Lilly endowed prizes and study fellowships.
The great-granddaughter of Eli Lilly, who founded the giant US pharmaceuticals company in 1876, it is thought that she gave away a total of $800 million during her lifetime. The donations helped a range of causes in and around her home city of Indianapolis and home state of Indiana, including the Brain Injury Association of Indiana, and the Indianapolis Opera Poetry was founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912. Monroe’s vision was to print the best poetry, she said, in whatever style, genre, or approach. Her magazine was helped to establish its reputation when it published work by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Now the magazine says it receives more than 90,000 poems from hopeful bards each year. Among those whose poems were rejected were works by Lilly herself. She is said to have taken the decision with equanimity, and indeed was pleased by the polite, encouraging manner in which her contributions were turned away.
Fiercely proud of its reputation as an independent authority on poetry, its ownership and control structure was reformed after receiving the $100 million Lilly bursary in 2002. Formerly published under the auspices of the Modern Poetry Association in 2003 it began operating under the Poetry Foundation. It claims to be the largest organisation of its kind in the world but attracted adverse comments from some who thought the money, and, the way it was managed, would impinge on its artistic principles.
Nearly two decades earlier, in 1986, Lilly endowed one of the most valuable poetry prizes. Adrienne Rich became the first recipient of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, given to living US poets whose work, in the view of the judges, warrants extraordinary recognition. Gary Snyder, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur also received the award.
As well as publishing new poetry, the Poetry Foundation also seeks to elevate the appreciation of poetry in the US. Its aim, it says, is to “influence the art form for the better by shaping a receptive climate for poetry ... in the long term, the Foundation aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art form by making it directly relevant to the American public”.
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Ruth Lilly was born in 1915 and attended Tudor Hall School in Indianapolis followed by the Herron School of Art. Debilitated by a long-running tendency to depressive illnesses, she was occasionally hospitalised. Her marriage in 1941 to Guernsey Van Riper ended in divorce in 1981. In the same year her financial affairs, and her philanthropy, were put under the guardianship of a lawyer. In the 1990s her health problems were alleviated when she began taking the antidepressant drug, Prozac, developed and sold by Eli Lilly.
Ruth Lilly, heiress and philanthropist, was born on August 2, 1915. She died on December 30, 2009, aged 94