U.K. little magazines: An introductory survey

Abstract

By the end of 1965, something of the present little magazine and small press scene was already emerging; of the 24 little magazines considered in detail here, one third were already in existence. Little magazines have played an essential part in the literary and artistic life of these islands for much longer. The Germ (1850) definitively inaugurated their recognizable history, which has continued through the late nineteenth century with such magazines as the one-issue Chameleon and Patrick Geddes' four issue The Evergreen into the twentieth century and the great days of Blast, The Egoist and Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse. Robert Hewison has underlined the important cultural role of little magazines and related anthologies during the war years. 1 Since 1945, however, the increasing flexibility of sophisticated yet economic reproduction techniques has led to a complex blossoming, with little magazines expressing a variety of trends and viewpoints. The fifties in the U.K. might be characterized as the years of the Movement. Importantly, Movement poets as Blake Morrison suggests, did not, as editors or contributors, find little magazines as central to their activities as many did before and since. 2 There was, of course, some involvement. Robert Conquest's New Lines anthology was a near-relative to the little magazine; several Movement poets (Amis, Davie, Gunn, Larkin) contributed to the Fantasy Press pamphlet series; and Larkin, whose The North Ship was published by the Fortune Press in 1945, contributed poems to such magazines as Departure, Listen, and Poetry and Audience. Despite these examples most Movement poets were readily assimilated into large-scale publishing houses (such as Faber) and the pages of large-circulation qual i ty Sunday papers and other weeklies. Alternative press outlets never played an enduringly fundamental role in their careers; the often-expressed antagonism of seminal Movement figures (such as Larkin and Amis) to abroad (America, Europe or elsewhere), modernism and excesses of all kinds has shown them to be at odds with much that has animated twentieth century little magazines. Arguably, Movement poets did much to create the readily visible ambience o f the fifties' poetry scene, and in this respect it is interesting to note that Edward Lucie-Smith in his introduction to his anthology British Poetry since 1945 (Penguin, 1970) denied that little magazines or little presses were of any real importance (having always existed to encourage ~the unfashionable) in accounting for post-War expansions in British poetic activity. Lucie-Smith is at least circumstantially connected with the Movement (by way of the Fantasy Press which published his work and the general Oxford cultural scene), and this most probably infects his perspective on the significance o f little magazines. It plainly ignores other currents of the 1950s which fall distinctly within the ambit o f the little magazine field. Attention to abroad, for example, was being paid. Peter Russell's Nine (1949-58) gave renewed attention to the work of Ezra