Charlotte Porter

Charlotte Endymion Porter (January 6, 1857 – January 16, 1942) was an American poet, translator, and literary critic and the cofounder and coeditor of the journal Poet Lore. She was the editor or coeditor of editions of the complete works of William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She worked as a translator of major writers from around the world for Poet Lore. She was influential in shaping the American literary taste of her day.

Education

Helen Charlotte Porter was born in Towanda, Pennsylvania, in 1857, one of three children of Henry Clinton Porter, a physician, and Elisa Eleanor (Betts) Porter. She later changed her name to Charlotte Endymion Porter, taking her middle name from a poem by John Keats. She attended Wells College in New York, graduating in 1875 and extending her studies in Shakespeare and French drama at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Journal editor and founder

In 1883, having moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she became the editor of the journal Shakespeariana. Through her work with this journal, she met her life partner, the writer Helen Archibald Clarke (1860–1926), with whom she afterwards collaborated on many projects. Porter resigned from the journal in 1887 after a dispute over her plans for expansion, following which she became for a short time the editor of the journal Ethical Record.

In 1889, Porter and Clarke founded the quarterly journal Poet Lore in Philadelphia, later moving it to Boston. Its stated aim was to champion the "comparative study of literature" and the work of Shakespeare and Robert Browning. After the first few years, the journal's focus on writing about Shakespeare and Browning shifted to encompass a broader view of world literature. In keeping with its mission, the magazine published few American writers but many from around the world, often in translation. Poet Lore helped introduce American readers to the work of such early modern writers as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Selma Lagerlöf, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, and Rabindranath Tagore. Many of these translations were by Porter, who developed a reputation as a good translator.