In November 1920, station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania broadcast the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election, widely considered the first commercial radio broadcast in history. Operated by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, the Pittsburgh station transmitted election returns to an estimated audience of several hundred listeners using electrical radio transmitters. This broadcast marked the beginning of radio as a mass medium, fundamentally changing how information, entertainment, and eventually poetry reached the American public.

The birth of commercial radio in Pittsburgh created an entirely new medium for the dissemination of poetry and literary culture, transforming the relationship between poets and their audiences. Radio brought poetry into living rooms across America, leading to the creation of radio poetry programs and influencing how poets wrote for the ear rather than the page. The medium's intimate, disembodied voice, transmitted as electrical signals through the ether, profoundly influenced the confessional poetry movement and the oral poetry tradition, from the radio broadcasts of Robert Frost to the later spoken word movement.