Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In future, the contents of this magazine must, by and large, speak for themselves: that is to say, mindful of Cyril Connolly’s sobering recollection that the editorial ‘we’ in his Horizon Comments was usually followed by a string of clichés, there will be few further introductions. Such observations as The London Magazine has to make upon the art and issues of our time will come in the text proper.

     Nevertheless, certain things, at the outset of a new programme, need to be said. John Lehmann’s retirement from the editing of this magazine, which he refounded in 1954 after its beauty-sleep of exactly a century and a quarter (the original London Magazine, in which Hazlitt, Keats, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt published some of their most celebrated work, ran from 1820-1829), marks not so much the close of a literary period as the end of an unusually distinguished editorial career. One could argue that the demise of Horizon and of Penguin New Writing in 1950 coincided much more exactly with a change in literary values, certainly in social attitudes and conditions. The left-wing idealism of the thirties under whose honourable, if battered, banner both these reviews were launched, had disintegrated in the threadbare bureaucracies of the Welfare State, the excitement of social revolution been deflated by fulfilment, as well as by the drab realities of post-war life. If, a decade later, we are not back where we started, it is because the world, even more violently than our view of it, has changed and been changed by an irreversible historical process. Yet no one could deny, I imagine, that a rusé, if honest cynicism, the result of whatever kind of experience, rather than political romanticism has characterized the arts, in almost all their forms, of the fifties. This is not necessarily a reason for gloom. Racial violence, the threat of nuclear warfare, the very uncertainty of human life, let alone on what terms and for whom, has, if anything, resulted in an increased rather than decreased awareness of what goes on around us. Anyone who visits what sub-editors like to call the ‘trouble spots’ — and there are few places left that escape this category — will confirm that, for all the bitterness, wanton destruction, and human misery, they tend to be exciting places to live in. In our pressurized cruising cabins, momentarily above or below the conflict, in the precarious safety of our own skins, we look more tenderly at those things we may lose for ever. A dawning or a dying culture, which of us can honestly be sure? London changes around us every day, and who knows but that in the next ten years a capital will be created, and a way of life to go with it, as dignified, elegant and pleasure-giving as any that has yet been experienced. Our dreams may be dangerous or commonplace, but whatever their outcome we can no longer vegetate in isolation. The sixties are unlikely to be painless; but what is quite certain is that they will not be dull. And which of us would not settle, at whatever cost in nervous anxiety, for a febrile and creative, rather than a static society? This magazine, we hope, will convey both the pressures and pleasures of our time as the arts reflect them.

     Words mean too much and too little, and in any case I set out to do something quite different, simply to pay some homage to John Lehmann who for twenty-five years has been among the outstanding editors of our time. Most editors have a decade that is particularly their own, and I suppose the New Writing period was more significant than the one that immediately followed it. That was scarcely John Lehmann’s fault. But had he not returned to editing after the closing-down of New Writing, four years later, at what seemed a particularly dispiriting moment, many poets, prose writers and critics, now well known, would have had just that much longer to live out their creative isolation. There are few writers of consequence between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five who have not, at one time or another, had cause to be grateful for the encouragement, conscientious criticism and downright trouble-taking that were his hallmarks as an editor. To these, perhaps merely worthy-seeming qualities (and on that account all the rarer) he added a remarkable talent-divining flair, a dogged refusal to be taken in either by the smart or the phoney, a concerned interest in the literature and arts of the United States and of most European countries. He retires from the magazine he edited for eighty-six issues with good wishes, gratitude and great affection.

     In Forewords to the last two numbers John Lehmann has described his aims, his policies, and looked back on some of the changes in literary outlook that have taken place during the last seven years. What for the future?

     This has seemed the moment for a general change in the magazine’s image, if not altogether in its character. Accordingly, a certain face-lifting has taken place, including a general redesigning of layout, shape and cover. We wanted an image both contemporary and comprehensive, something that would en-compass essays on abstract expressionists as well as, if need be, Shakespearean criticism.

     However, the major change in the magazine is simply this: up till now The London Magazine has been ‘a monthly review of literature’. Henceforth it will be a ‘review of the arts’, in which, in addition to the present range of subjects, features on painting, sculpture, music, films and theatre will regularly appear. John Whiting will be our main theatre writer, but we are open to contributors on each of the arts, as well as from our permanent team of critics. Generally speaking, we intend, in the book section as well, to go for the solid, over-all assessment rather than the glorified review. At the same time, with the co-operation of publishers in letting us have bound proofs, we mean to print individual notices as near as possible to the time of publication.

     There is a limit to what a monthly review devoted to the arts can conveniently handle. What we hope to continue to do are those particular things that are outside the scope of Sunday and weekly papers. For instance, we shall have room for short stories and critical articles up to 10,000 words, if they are good enough. We shall print as much interesting poetry as we can get, in a context in which its importance will remain clear. A good poem should be greeted as an event, not as a mere space filler. In the main, though, the pleasure a magazine gives to its readers, as well as to its contributors, derives from its atmosphere, something as real as it is elusive and intangible.

     We shall aim to provide criticism of literature that is serious, lively, and free of jargon: in painting to challenge the values that boost, for commercial reasons, a commonplace but marketable ‘international style’, many of whose practitioners bear the same relation to art as do interior decorators or the masters of fashion houses. From time to time, we shall issue special numbers, dealing with the arts of a particular country or on specific themes to do with architecture, the theatre, painting.

     Politics, in the narrower, professional sense, we shall leave to others. There is another sense in which they concern our every act, our every word. If one of the main criteria by which we shall accept or reject contributions will be whether they would, in our opinion, stand up to publication in hard covers five years later, we shall at the same time expect that the contents of The London Magazine over any period should show a true concern for the principles by which we live and ought to live. It is impossible to avoid implicit moral judgements and we shall not try.

     Gravity, then, but never solemnity. Astringency but not malice. And at all costs experiment, the hopefulness that the best, even most melancholy art, always must generate, even in despite of itself. If we fail, it will not be through want of effort.

     A last word about immediate plans. We begin in this number a series ‘Developments in Style’ in which, with or without text, we shall illustrate the works of contemporary painters, both English and otherwise, over a crucial period in modern art. Through a study of individual manners we shall cover the main ways in which the art of our time is evolving. In July we shall devote most of an issue to Painting 1961, following this, at quarterly intervals, with similar treatments of poetry, theatre and films. Much of the best critical writing today is done in specialist magazines for other specialists. Perhaps the best contribution we could possibly make would be to create a change in emphasis, to discuss the arts in terms of each other, in a way that would lessen the immediate separateness, even loneliness, of each kind of modern artist.

     ‘Rising costs’, if not falling circulations, are the nightmare of most literary reviews. We are not indefinitely free of these worries, any more than are others, but we hope that by taking the gamble, by spending more on the production and contents of the magazine, we shall in turn be rewarded by more readers and more advertisers. It seems the one gamble really worth taking.