William Carlos Williams and the Machine of the American Little Magazines
“An artist is NOT forced out of life, he refuses it. He does so willfully. He writes in order to escape the mechanical perfection of sheer existence. He writes to assert himself above every machine and every mechanical conception that seeks to bind him. He writes to free himself, to annihilate every machine, every science, to escape defiant through consciousness and accuracy of emotional expression. And this can never occur until he is conscious of and takes discriminating grips upon the first brains of his generation.” – William Carlos Williams in Others
The little magazines gave the poets of the Modernist movement a place to present their work without considering the strictures of conventional larger-circulation magazines. Editors such a Marianne Moore, Margret Anderson, and Alfred Kreymborg, created and ran magazines that created dialogue amongst the Modernists and gave them space where their work would not be refused, but rather published and exposed to others of like mind and Modernist sway. Little magazines such as Poetry, The Little Review, The Dial, The Egoist and Others, to name a few, gave poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, and James Joyce a place to publish their work which no other publication would consider.
One Modernist poet who was not only an avid contributor to little magazines, but also funded and edited several of his own was William Carlos Williams. Although Williams was a physician by trade, his involvement in the world of Modernism began in college when he became friends with Ezra Pound. Through his affiliation with Pound, Williams became highly involved with the Modernist movement. He became involved in the development of the movement not just through his writing, but through his advocacy and support for little magazines that published the work of Modernist writers and artists.
In his work as a poet, Williams championed the American idiom and the "local" of the urban landscape or one's immediate environment. He paid close attention to ordinary scenes, the working class and poor and giving them voice though his poetry. As the opening quote indicates, Williams' work demonstrated his belief in the artist's need to destroy or deconstruct that which had become outworn and to reassemble or recreate with fresh vision and language. In this, he was a Modernist poet. In his workhe used his experience as a doctor, married man, father, son, and friend, to give it depth and create a sense of the real. Williams’ belief was that there was a need to discover rather than impose order on reality (Graham). What he proposed to do through his poetry also became his vision for the American little magazines as well.
Starting in 1913, when three of his poems were accepted by Poetry, Williams’ poetry and prose was constantly being submitted to and being published by little magazines. He continued to contribute and support little magazines until the time of his death in 1963. It is said that because of his involvement in these publications he met, corresponded with, and in turn influenced three generations of writers from Pound to Hemingway and beyond (Thirlwall xv). Yet Williams’ fought an upward battle to be recognized as an accomplished poet in his lifetime.
His drive to create a distinctly American voice drew great criticism, including that of his close friend, Ezra Pound. The American idiom was considered to be “low” and was harshly judged against European standards. But determined to define a language that were characteristically American and separate from Europe’s “standards”, Williams forged ahead (Wixson 98). Much of the work he did to forward his cause was done through the poetry and prose he published in little magazines. Furthermore, he began to become involved with the creation and editing of little magazine in order to create venues for the work of American poets.
In his autobiography, Williams describes the little magazines as a precarious business. They were always verging on bankruptcy and constantly going under. But while the magazines were alive there would be a “steady trickle of excellence, mixed with the bad, that served to keep writing loose, ready to accept the early, sensitive acquisition to the art” (265). The small publications were a platform for poets to publish their rebellious work and get noticed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane point out in their article, “Movements, Magazines and Manifestos, The Succession From Naturalism”, that “[i]t was largely through such magazines that the evolving works of Modernism achieved their transmission, sought out their audiences” (203).
Williams saw the numerous little magazines as one large machine that worked together to give modernist poets their platform.
"The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule. There is absolutely no dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything. When it is in any way successful it is because it fills a need in someone’s mind to keep going. When it dies, someone else takes it up in some other part of the country – quite by accident – out of a desire to get the writing down on paper." (266)
While Williams submitted to and was published in Poetry and The Egoist regularly, starting in 1913, his involvement with the editorial process of American little magazines started with Others in collaboration with Alfred Kreymborg. Others was created in response to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry under the theory that it would publish the poetry that Monroe refused. It would be radical, devoted to experiment and by publishing refused works, would elevate those writers and artists tofame (Wetzsteon 351). Kreymborg felt that it was through rejection that the French artists gained fame, so why would this not work with Monroe’s rejected Modernists? Thus Others was born. It ran from 1915 to 1919.
While Others was heralded as the “sun of a new dawn” and as “the first democratic means for expression” for American writers it also received harsh criticism from conventional and Modernist critics alike (Williams, Selected Letters 31). While the magazine published the works of established
Modernists such as Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Pound, Carl Sandburg, Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamps, it had the need to fill its pages with lesser known writers of a lower caliber of writing ability (Wetzsteon 355). Williams found the low standards for publishing frustrating, but the inability of the critics to see the writing for its potential even more so.
In the final issue of the magazine publishedin July of 1919 Williams rails at the stupidity of critics in America in an article entitled “Belly Music”. The opening quote of the paper comes from this angry article and shows Williams’ deep-seated belief that the artist creates in order to break traditions and to set new standards for art that may not be “beautiful”. Frustrated with the inability of the critics to see the value of the work published in Others as contributing to the development of the Modernist movement, Williams labeled the critics as being sophomoric, puling, and nonsensical.
"… what do their criticisms amount to more than an isolated perception of certain values. … Never is their criticism a new SIGHT of a SOURCE, a flash into the future of art, wings under which a poet might spread his sparrow’s wings and mount to the sky! They SEE nothing. It is never a confidence in the purgation by thought. It is puling testiness in most cases or a benign ignorance in others of the purpose of the work with which they are dealing." (Williams, Others Supplement 29)
Williams continued this rant in The Little Review in an article entitled “More Swill”
"Americans are cursed with a desire to be understood. Everything must be “beautiful” or it must show this or that wellunderstood perfection, but it never occurs to an American, to an American critic in this case, to discover first whether he is dealing with a live thing or with the symmetries of a corpse. It never occurs to an American critic to question whether or not a work shows evidence of creative thought … But all thought is ugly to the American critic – especially if it come from the left. And since in a work of art the form of the composition bespeaks the thought, then all new forms are inevitably anathema and this is not alone true of America." (Williams, The Little Review 29-30)
Through the little magazines, in spite of the critics, Modernists continued to have their work published and through this exposure, the movement grew. Yet the American little magazines, like their counterparts overseas, were in constant flux due to small readership, lack of patronage and loss of funds due to WWI and the Great Depression. But as one folded, another would emerge. According to Williams, the late 1920’s were the heyday of the little magazine and he was represented in almost all of them (243). Modernist writers, authors and critics were all having a chance to expose their works and ideas. While the editors would often solicit the work of poets like Williams, there were not many who could give monetary compensation.
Most of the paying magazines were too conventional to take on Modernist poets and of the little magazines, Poetry and The Dial would pay for poems, but The Little Review did not have the funds to do so. Most of the little magazines could not pay their writers if they wanted to stay afloat in the industry. Yet Williams did not see this as an obstacle. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, Williams urges her to reconsider paying for poems saying that it will be the ruination of her magazine.
"What you are doing by paying what you do for poems is this: you are jeopardizing the existence of your magazine in the mistaken notion that what poets want is money, when in reality – though money is sorely needed also – they need space, an opportunity to gain print often and at will. This lack of space, this lack of opportunity to appear is the hell. And you will add to this by going bankrupt!" (Williams, Selected Letters 41)
For Williams it was more important to have the venue for publishing rather than compensation. With this in mind and his previous experience with Others, Willliams created his own little magazine with Robert
McAlmon. Contact was createdin 1920 with the idea that they would be providing a place for American artists to be published and exposed. In the opening editorial to Contact published in December of 1920, Williams addressed the vision that he and McAlmon had for the magazine, “We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience” (1).
In this editorial, Williams goes on to clarify that although this was an American publication, there would be no aggressive attitude toward “imported thought” or art. The editors would not take it upon themselves to determine what was good but would set standards for what they published.
"Our only insistances are upon standards which reality as the artist senses it creates, in contradistinction to standards of social, moral or scholastic value – hangovers from past generations no better equipped to ascertain value than are we. Assuming sufficient insight and intellect to convey feeling valuably, we are interested in the writings of such individuals as are capable of putting a sense of contact, and of definite personal realization into their work." (1)
This manifesto closely relates to Williams’ own approach to his poetry. Williams wanted his poetry to run like a machine. “His purpose was not to point a moral or teach a lesson; rather, he wanted his readers to see through his eyes the beauty of the real” (Wagner-Martin).
In the second issue of Contact, Williams writes a “comment” in response to the criticism the first issue garnered. “In answer to all criticisms we find the first issue of Contact perfect, the first truly representative American magazine of art yet published” (Williams, Selected Essays 27). Williams goes on to again emphasize that the function of the magazine is to set up new artistic perceptions, invention, and expression in the United States. He likens the United States to an artistic desert that can only be fixed with a stronger interchange of ideas which the magazine will provide. He continues to emphasize the importance of mutual contact among serious writers and that by creating a venue for such contact that the American work will “come to the fore of intelligent attention” and American ignorance will be dissipated (29).
These ideals were ones that Williams carried with him throughout his life. Contact ran from December of 1920 until July of 1923 with five issues.It was briefly revived in 1932 with only three issues published between February and October. Even though this may be seen as a publishing failure, the magazine succeeded in providing a space for Williams and his fellow Modernists to publish their works. While the first issues of Contact published recognized Modernist writers such as Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley and H.D., the second revival of the publication started including work by e.e. cummings and Diego Rivera, the upcoming generation of Modernists. Also, in Contact came the “Bibliography of Little Magazines published in America since 1900.” which represents one of the first attempts to catalogue little magazines. The bibliography spanned all three issues of Contact. More so, from his affiliation with Robert McAlmon with Contact(I) and Contact (II), came the publishing company Contact Editions which went on to publish Ernest Hemingway’s first two novels andthe works of Pound and Stein, amongst others.
Williams continued to support the American little magazines through sponsorship and submission until his death. One of his last living submissions to a little magazine was “Four Last Poems” to The Hudson Review in 1963 (Wallace 244). His wife continued to submit his works posthumously until her death. In an interview a few years before his death, Williams spoke of the role the little magazines played in his work as a poet.
"The “little magazines” were there, always there, anxious for new material, and I was always anxious to give it to them. They would ask – there was always a new one; still is – and I was always happy to be printed by them. Wonderful things came out of this kind of association … The whole history of first publication for me lies in the archives of various “little magazines.” I love them. I am grateful to them. I shall always support them." (Heal 94)
Williams’ lifetime achievement as the “patron saint of American poetry” and his advocacy of American little magazines seems exemplified by the last two lines of the opening quote, “He [the artist] writes to free himself, to annihilate every machine, every science, to escape defiant through consciousness and accuracy of emotional expression. And this can never occur until he is conscious of and takes discriminating grips upon the first brains of his generation” (Williams, Others, 26). Williams strove to create an environment where the American writer would be heard and accepted as a true literary voice. His relentless pursuit of this goal was realized through his work with the American little magazines. Although it was not until after World War II that Williams was finally acknowledged for having created a distinctly American presence in poetry (Wixson 94), one only need look to his early work with the American little magazines to see how this was accomplished.
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