When Partisan Review was shuttered in 2003, after seven decades of publication, it served as a pointed warning of the dangers facing little magazines. In almost every case, the glory days of a small literary or intellectual review come at the beginning, fueled by the editors’ need to make a point, or a name, or both. But when such a magazine succeeds, there is a natural reluctance to let it fade away after its natural lifespan of five or 10 years; so it frequently lingers on, the mausoleum of its own past influence.

By this measure, at the time Partisan Review began publishing, Poetry was already ancient. Founded in 1912, it is older than Time, older than the New Yorker, and a great deal older than the institutions that now define the poetry world. In fact, writers’ workshops and MFA programs and nonprofit publishers – all the infrastructure of American poetry – might be said to have sprung from the pages of Poetry, which in its fabled early years helped to establish poetry as a serious American art.

No history of American literature would be complete without a mention of Harriet Monroe, the Chicago philanthropist who allowed her magazine, sometimes against her own better judgment, to be commandeered by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the other leading lights of Modernism. Any periodical that, in its first five years, publishes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” along with major poems by Pound, Williams, and Yeats, has earned a place in the Parnassus of little magazines.

The problem for Poetry has always been to find a worthy second act. Over its more than 90 years, Poetry has been several different magazines, some vital and memorable – as when it was edited by Karl Shapiro in the early 1950s – but most stolidly institutional. Its age and prestige mean America’s best poets have always been glad to publish there. But there was a long period when it seemed Poetry would never again occupy a literary position as central as its geographical one.

In the last two years, however, that has changed. Poetry and the foundation that owns it have been in the headlines a good deal recently, thanks to the staggering $100 million bequest they received in 2002 from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly. The literary fruits of that endowment are only beginning to be seen – Poetry has launched a new group of awards, and sponsored an interesting new series of “Neglected Masters” books with the Library of America. More programs and experiments are sure to come. It seems a shame Ezra Pound is no longer around to take charge of the bequest, since it is just the kind of princely patronage he dreamed about his whole life.

But the real news about Poetry today is in the pages of the magazine itself. Under its new editor, Christian Wiman, Poetry has done what long seemed impossible: It has reclaimed its place at the center of American poetry. More, it has become one of the most interesting literary periodicals of any kind published today. Traditionally, only poets read Poetry; thanks to Mr. Wiman’s innovations, it has become indispensable reading for anyone who cares about American literature. And the numbers show that the word is spreading: Today the magazine’s circulation is at 27,000, up from 11,000 since Mr. Wiman’s first issue in October 2003.

The excitement of today’s Poetry has to do with its challenge to today’s poetry – that is, to its own audience. Under Mr. Wiman, Poetry has done what so few magazines of literary and political opinion ever dare: It has confronted its readers with new, potentially upsetting ideas. According to Mr. Wiman, “The biggest challenge” facing him when he accepted the editor’s job “was giving a real jolt to the magazine without violating its spirit and history.”

The intellectual origins of today’s Poetry seem to lie in Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” which set out what has become an influential critique of the American poetry world. The art of poetry, Mr. Gioia argued, had become a profession – cloistered in university writing departments, indifferent to the general reading public, and incapable of honest self-criticism. Until it began to address and care about the common reader, poetry would never reclaim its place as the highest branch of literature; instead, it would dwindle into a mere craft, a hobby for the MFA set.

Under Mr. Wiman, Poetry has carried this critique into the heartland of the poetry establishment. It has suggested, more or less explicitly, that today’s poets are intellectually provincial; that the entrenched institutions of the poetry world are stultifying; that the art’s ambitions are too low, its achievements too often mediocre. As Mr. Wiman editorialized in the January 2005 issue, “For poetry … to become professionalized is a disaster. But that is largely what is happening in this country….The whole enterprise seems to have high walls around it.”

Mr. Wiman, already a well-known poet and critic when he became editor, has played the role of poetry’s Joshua, using the magazine’s trumpet to bring those walls down. While the poems that occupy the first half of each issue are generally of a high standard, the real excitement of the new Poetry lies in the back of the book, where the reviews, essays, and critical symposia are consistently and intelligently provocative.

To gauge just how provocative, take look at the letters section: an issue seldom goes by without an outraged missive from a subscriber, complaining about the sharpness of a review or the puncturing of a reputation. (“Much as I’d like to,” Mr. Wiman said wryly, ” can’t publish the things that people scream in my face.”) Earlier this year one issue drew letters calling it “the most disappointing issue of Poetry have ever read” and “the best issue of the magazine in a long, long time.”

That is a sure sign Mr. Wiman is doing something right. After all, as Ezra Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe back in 1912, “It’s only when a few men who know, get together and disagree that any sort of criticism is born.”

Raising people’s temperatures is part of Mr. Wiman’s strategy: As he explained in an editorial in the September 2005 issue, “We wanted to eliminate the descriptive review, those pieces you finish without any clear idea of whether its author loved or hated the book in question. … Poetry is not served by protecting it like some endangered species.” Mr. Wiman’s contributors have obliged, choosing targets across the literary-political spectrum. A review of an anthology of avant-garde, experimental writing denounced it as “one ‘new American poet’ after another, stimulating itself in full exposure”; while a re view of Ted Kooser’s tame Midwestern poetry complained about his “abridgment of a region into seventy-five synonyms of ‘homespun.'” (Full disclosure I have both written for the magazine and been written about there, and felt the sharpness on both sides.)

Still more adventurous than the re views, however, are Mr. Wiman’s efforts to broaden the discussion of poetry be yond those professionally involved with it. In an ongoing symposium titled “The View From Here,” Mr. Wiman has invited people from all walks of life to discuss what poetry means to them. The results have been truly illuminating showing that poetry does still matter to a very wide range of people. Timothy Goeglein, a senior Bush White House staffer, wrote about finding solace in the religious verse of Herbert, Eliot and Hopkins. The actor Alfred Molina explained the dramatic qualities of Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” “scene that lived in my mind as clearly as a shot from a movie.” Even the superintendent of West Point weighed in, to discuss how teaching poetry helps to “con front cadets with new ideas that challenge their worldview.”

These are voices most poets would never hear, reminding them that poems remain a common possession of all educated people. If the new Poetry succeeds in reminding the “poetry world of that fact, it will have accomplished as much as any bequest ever could.