Title:
The Poetry Review of America

Date of Publication: 
May 1916-February 1917

Place(s) of Publication:
Boston, Massachusetts

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation:
Vol.1: 6 issues; Vol. 2: 4 issues

Publisher: 
William Stanley Braithwaite, Poetry Review Co.

Physical Description: 
19.4 x 12.0 cm. Black and white cover; no cover illustration. Two-column format, no illustration throughout the magazine; 16-20 pages of poetry, articles, and reviews of poets in each issue.

Editor(s): 
William Stanley Braithwaite

Associate Editor(s):
Joseph Lebowich

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of California

Online PDF

Reprint Editions: 
PDF files of vol.1 and vol. 2 available online through Hathi Trust

The Poetry Review of America is a little modernist magazine edited by William Stanley Braithwaite that ran for just under a year. The magazine is Boston-based, poetry-focused, and relatively simple in both in content and design (Churchill and Jaffee 313). Though the magazine is not widely read or studied, Braithwaite, an African-American, was an instrumental figure in the development of American poetry (313). He was more passionate about furthering a dialogue on poetry than engaging in avant-garde debate or cultural reform at the time, such as the debate on the use of free verse versus metrical poetry (309). Braithwaite is better known for his work with anthologies of poetry than for his run with The Poetry Review of America, though the two areas of his work shared a common goal, “to unite competing factions and establish a canon of contemporary American Poetry” (316).

The Poetry Review of America’s statement of purpose appeared on the first page of the first issue of the magazine. It was written by William Stanley Braithwaite, editor for the duration of publication. 

The spirit of The Poetry Review of America will be one of advancement and co-operation; the desire to serve the art of poetry and to consolidate public interest in its growth and popularity – to quicken and enlarge the poetic pulse of the country. In that spirit, we propose to our contemporaries in the field a union of effort and mutual encouragement; to the poets of America an open forum and a clearing-house for ways and means to serve the art we all love; to the poetry-reading public of our country we pledge a never-ceasing striving for the best in American poetry, and a constant effort to bring out the strength and joy to be derived therefrom.

The Editors of The Poetry Review intend to be wholly impartial as to the kinds of poetry that are to be published, being concerned only with the degree of success attained in the poem as an artistic product. Catholicity of taste and standard of performance will be the guiding factors in accepting poems.

Besides the poems, each issue will contain comprehensive and serious reviews of new volumes of poems, and of works concerning poets and poetry, written by competent critics in a thoroughly biased spirit; special articles touching every phrase of poetic activity; studies of important figures in contemporary American poetry; an open house for an exchange of ideas on matters poetic; editorials and notes, news and opinions, doings and theories, events and discussions— in truth, a comprehensive history of all the forces which make for progress of poetry in America.

( Issue No. 1 of Volume 1 of The Poetry Review of America)

William Stanley Braithwaite (1878 – 1962)
Editor: 1916 – 1917

William Stanley Braithwaite was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to mother Emily and  father William, a mulatto from Barbados (Szefel 1). At age twelve, Braithwaite was forced to drop out of school to support his family after his father’s sudden death. He worked as a paper delivery boy, stockroom boy, and brush boy at a barbershop. In all his work, he faced prejudices against his African American race. When he was a teenager, he began working at Ginn and Company, a printing firm in Boston, where he found beauty in reading and writing poetry. He wrote poetry in his free time. He found help in Herbert Turner and the Boston Authors Club to get three volumes of work published. When they did not receive as much praise and accolades as he had wanted, Braithwaite realized he would better excel in “advocating, rather than authoring, poetry” (6). He became editor of the Boston Evening Transcript before beginning his own magazine, The Poetry Review of America from 1916 to 1917. He wanted to include writers in his magazine that would write on contemporary issues, such as “ethnicity, social strife sensuality,” in order to evoke political and social change in his readers (2-3).

Lydia Bradt Antholo
“Heavy Rain- Filling the Cup”
“Nunc Scio Quid Sit Amor”

Amelia Josephine Burr
“Poet of Living”
“Vengeance”

Padraic Colum
“The Ballad of Downal Baun”

John Gould Fletcher
“Spring”
“Lincoln”

Benjamin R. C. Low
“Jack O’Dreams”
“Underground”

Amy Lowell
“Number 3 on the Docket”
Amy Lowell, “Two Imagist Poets” [review]

Edward J. O’Brien
Edward J. O’Brien, “Walter Conrad Arensberg” [review]
Edward J. O’Brien, “James Oppenheim” [review]

Jeannette Marks
“Contemporary Poetry in the College Classroom”

Louis Untermeyer
“Portrait of a Child”
“The Brooke Legend”

Title: 
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 
Subtitle dropped v. 71

Date of Publication: 
October 1912 (1.1) –

Place(s) of Publication: 
Chicago, Illinois

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation: 
1,065 (1912 – 1913)
1,891 (1921 – 1922)

Publisher:
Harriet Monroe, 543 Cass St., Chicago (Oct. 1912 – Jan. 1915)
Seymour, Daughaday and Company, 1025 Fine Arts Building, Chicago (Feb. 1915 – Sept. 1915)
Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1025 Fine Arts Building, Chicago (After Oct. 1915)

Physical Description: 
5 x 7; originally bound in a light tan cover that always contained a picture of Pegasus.

Price: 
$1.50 per year (1912 – 1913)
$3 per year (1921 – 1922)

Editor(s): 
Harriet Monroe

Associate Editor(s): 
Alice Corbin Henderson
Ezra Pound (Foreign Editor)

Libraries with Original Issues: 
Brown University; University of California, Los Angeles
Searchable PDFs of 1912 – 1922 available at Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project

Reprint Editions: 
New York, New York: AMS Reprint. Covers 1912 – 1928.
Chicago, Modern Poetry Association, (1912 – ). Reorganized as the Poetry Foundation, 2002.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912 because she was dissatisfied with the opportunities available for American poets. Popular magazines gave poetry a minor role, as they desired more “serious” fiction and essays; Monroe sought to remedy this problem by creating a publication exclusively for poets. She hoped to create a magazine in which poems of extensive length and difficulty could be published, as well as provide forum for amateurs trying to put their work in circulation. An open door policy was established in 1912, keeping the magazine open to all poetic schools.

With the help of patron and friend HC Taylor, Monroe solicited one hundred businessmen and women to pledge fifty dollars a year for five years to ensure Poetry‘s economic stability during its infancy. Monroe sent a “poets circular” in search of contributors to fifty American and British poets, almost all of whom replied with interest to her inquiry. Among her earliest and most notable supporters were Ezra Pound, who served as the magazine’s foreign editor, and the indispensable Alice Corbin Henderson, Monroe’s associate editor. In its first years Poetry boasted an impressive list of contributors which included Wallace Stevens, Lindsay Vachel, and W. B. Yeats, as well as several pioneers in the Imagiste movement, such as Pound, H. D., and Amy Lowell.

One of the more conservative little magazines in print, Poetry gained the respect of a wide audience. It published the first poems of fledgling poets like Marianne Moore as well as the work of more established poets like T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. As it increased in both prestige and age, Poetry became the definitive magazine of verse, publishing both minor and canonized twentieth century poets to the present day.

In the first issue, Harriet Monroe explicitly stated the magazine’s purpose and aims:

THE MOTIVE OF THE MAGAZINE

“In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them.

The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of power, if they are to do their work and be heard. For as the world grows greater day by day, as every member of it, through something he buys or knows or loves, reaches out to the ends of the earth, things precious to the race, things rare and delicate, may be overpowered, lost in the criss-cross of modern currents, the confusion of modern immensities.

Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the great cities of the world; and every week or two a new periodical is born to speak for one or the other of them, and tenderly nursed at some guardian’s expense. Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered, willy-nilly, by men’s material needs. Poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and glamour.

Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process as unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. The people must do their part if the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as the rose.

The present venture is a modest effort to give to poetry her own place, her own voice. The popular magazines can afford her but scant courtesy–a Cinderella corner in the ashes–because they seek a large public which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their verse but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their literature, even in prose. Most magazine editors say that there is no public for poetry in America; one of them wrote to a young poet that the verse his monthly accepted “must appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle West,” and others prove their distrust by printing less verse from year to year, and that rarely beyond page-end length and importance.

We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance. In this belief we have been encouraged by the generous enthusiasm of many subscribers to our fund, by the sympathy of other lovers of the art, and by the quick response of many prominent poets, both American and English, who have sent or promised contributions.

We hope to publish in Poetry some of the best work now being done in English verse. Within space limitations set at present by the small size of our monthly sheaf, we shall be able to print poems longer, and of more intimate and serious character, than the popular magazines can afford to use. The test, limited by ever-fallible human judgment, is to be quality alone; all forms, whether narrative, dramatic or lyric, will be acceptable. We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a green isle in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and Truth, austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, may follow her brave quest unafraid.”

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1:1 (1912): 26-28.

Harriet Monroe (Dec. 23, 1860 – Sept. 26, 1936)
Editor: Oct. 1912 – July 1936 

Harriet Monroe, a Chicago native, spent part of her early life studying in China. Upon her return to the United States she was highly dissatisfied with the poetic scene. Her poetry submissions were rejected from magazines such as Atlantic Monthly, a publication that, like many, held the view that poetry was a mere filler for the more important essays and articles. In 1912 at the age of fifty-one, she created a new forum exclusively for poets: Poetry. During her lifetime Monroe edited several volumes of poetry, wrote a book of collected essays, Poets and their Art, co-edited an anthology called The New Poetry with her colleague and friend Alice Corbin Henderson, and composed an autobiography, A Poet’s Life.

Alice Corbin Henderson (Apr. 16, 1881 – July 18, 1949)
Associate Editor: Oct. 1912 – 1922

Drawing upon the experiences gained from moving frequently in her childhood, Alice Corbin Henderson published her first book of poetry when she was a junior in high school. When she moved to Chicago in 1903, she met art instructor William Penhallow Henderson, whom she married and who illustrated her first children’s work, Adam’s Dream and Two Other Miracle Plays for Children (1909). In 1912 she cofounded Poetry with Harriet Monroe. Henderson often receives credit for discovering such poets as Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg (Anderson). She and Monroe edited an anthology, The New Poetry (1917), but Henderson fell ill and sought a warmer region for her health. She spent the final years of her life in Santa Fe, embracing the regional voice; the Henderson’s New Mexican home, Camino del Monte Sol, became a popular gathering ground for authors like Witter Bynner and John Gould Fletcher to share their works.

Conrad Aiken
“Discordants”

Richard Aldington
“Choricos”

H. D.
“The Shrine”

T. S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Robert Frost
“The Code-Heroics”

Joyce Kilmer
“Trees”

D. H. Lawrence
“Don Juan”

Amy Lowell
“Red Slippers”

Marianne Moore
“The Wizard in Words”

Ezra Pound
“In a Station of the Metro”

Carl Sandburg
“Chicago Poems”

Wallace Stevens
“Phases”

William Carlos Williams
“Postlude”

W. B. Yeats
“The Realists”

Anderson, H. Allen. “Henderson, Alice Corbin.” American National Biography Online. 2000. American Council of Learned Societies. 7 July 2009.

Arzaga, Lorelei. The Poetics of Harriet Monroe. MA thesis. California State University, Long Beach, 1992.

Cahill, Daniel J. Harriet Monroe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973.

Goldbarth, Albert. “The Lake.” Georgia Review (1996): 360-379.

Henderson, Alice Corbin. “Harriet Monroe and Poetry’s Early Years.” Illinois Writers Review 7.2 (1998): 16-21.

Images. “Poetry.” The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 17 July 2009.

Massa, Ann. Form Follows Function: The Construction of Harriet Monroe and Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Monroe, Harriet. A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World. New York: MacMillan, 1938.

——–. Introduction. New Poetry. Eds.  Michael Hoffman & Patrick Murphy. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Newcomb, John Timberman: “Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens: Little Magazines as Agents of Reputation,” Essays in Literature, 16.2 (Fall 1989): 256-270.

Parisi, Joseph, Stephen Young. Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters: The First Fifty Years, 1912-1962. New York: Norton, 2002.

———. “An American Institution:” Poetry Founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Chicago, Modern Poetry Association. 1980.

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912 – 1928. New York: AMS Reprints.

Sherbo, Arthur. “Harriet Monroe’s Chicago Letters” Diss. 1982.

William, Ellen. Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

“Poetry” compiled by Alice Neumann (Class of ’06) & Simone Muller (visiting student, Davidson College)

Title:
Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire

Date of Publication: 
Sept. 1919 – July 1924

Place of Publication:
New York, NY

Frequency of Publication: 
Irregular (intended quarterly). Publication was suspended from July 1921 to February 1923.

Circulation:
~255 subscribers from 1919-1921, mainly from New York City, California, and New York state. There were also subscription requests from Havana, Osaka, Paris, and Shanghai.

Publisher: 
Egmont Arens, New York. 17 West 8th St.

Physical Description: 
30 cm. Some issues contain original hand-pulled woodcuts and linocuts.

Editor(s): 
Egmont Arens

Libraries with Original Issues:
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Smithsonian

Reprint Editions: 
None

Launched in New York City in January, 1919, Playboy: A portfolio of art and satire features a wide range of artistic and literary contributions from a diverse group of men, women, and children. Published and edited by Egmont Arens (1889-1966), owner of the Washington Square Bookshop, this little magazine was created to strengthen the intellectual community within Greenwich Village. An out-growth of the Bohemian Artistic community of Greenwich Village, the magazine enhanced the sense of community among artists and writers who lived there and further afield. In its five-year run, only nine issues of Playboy were published (most during its first two years), with the journal taking a hiatus from July 1921 to February 1923.

Each issue contained many different forms, styles, and genres of modernist art and literature, featuring a variety of original drawings, photographs, linocuts, and woodcuts. Notable contributors included Ezra Pound, Max Weber, Mina Loy, and Egmont Arens himself. 

Towards the end of its run in 1924, the publication became more local in its focus, largely due to Arens’ decision to feature art borrowed from local galleries (Martin 40). At the same time, he became increasingly more committed to his work as the editor of Vanity Fair. This eclectic periodical offered a platform for known and unknown artists and writers to construct their own community’s narrative and contribute to an ever-emerging modernist movement.

Although Playboy never explicitly released a manifesto, the inside cover of the First Quarter 1923 issue provides a statement of intent*:

PLAYBOY hitherto published at odd intervals with this issue appears as a quartlerly. It seems important to publish, and to publish regularly A PORTFOLIO informal, spontaneous, uncensored and frankly experimental, which shall open its pages to those who are trying to blaze new paths of artistic expression; coming with laughter and jocundity, charging with colorful weapons OF ART AND SATIRE against the dullness, ugliness and backward-lookingness of our own day. Being in its very nature non-commercial, this enterprise needs the financial support of those who are in sympathy with its aims and such are invited to read the details of a plan, on the inside back cover, whereby they may help to make this THE MAGAZINE OF TODAY!!

*(typography style preserved from the original)

Egmont Arens (December 15, 1887 – October 2, 1966)                                       Editor: 1919-1924

Upon completing his studies at the University of New Mexico and the University of Chicago in 1916, Arens began his career in publishing by working as the sports editor at the Albuquerque Citizen-Tribune. He then moved to New York City, where he purchased the Washington Square Bookshop in Greenwich Village and operated it from 1917-1923. Inspired by the creative energy in the bookstore, Arens began to edit, publish, and sell many works such as the Flying Stag Plays, The Little Book of Greenwich Village, and the little magazine, Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire (Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center). Throughout his publication processes, Arens cultivated an adoration for visual art and became the art editor at Vanity Fair from 1922-1923 and the editor of the Creative Arts Magazine from 1927-1927. His career trajectory shifted in the 1930’s when Arens became more interested in industrial design and food packaging. After serving as the director of advertising at Calkins & Holden from 1929-1936, Arens designed the a model “K” mixer, which KitchenAid still manufactures today (Cooper Hewitt). Arens spent the later years of his life establishing the Society of Industrial Designers and the Package Designers Council. In 1965, Arens was inducted into the Academy of Fellows. He passed away on October 2, 1966, in New York City.

Mina Loy
“Preceptors of Childhood”

Max Weber
“Seclusion, A Painting”

e. e. Cummings
“Cleopatra, A Poem”
“Mark and Lil, A Poem”
“Two Poems”

T.S Eliot
“The Ruined Cell, A Prize Poem”

James Joyce
“The Day of the Rabblement, A Reprint”

Marguerite Zorach
“Linoleum Cut”

Hugo Gellert
“Southwind, A Drawing”

H. Varnam Poor
“Decorated Pottery”

Beasley, Rebecca. “Literature and the Visual Arts.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1st ed. ed., Oxford University Press, 2009.

“Biographical History.” Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center.

“Egmont C. Arens.” Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, collection.cooperhewitt.org/people/18536871/bio.

“Egmont Arens: The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door.” Harry Ransom Center RSS, norman.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/signature.cfm?item=131#1.

Hoffman, Frederick J. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. [2d ed.]. ed., Princeton University Press, 1947.

Martin, Monika. “Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire, 1919-1924 Article.” Lehigh Review, vol. 23, 2015, pp. 37-43.

Morgan, Susan. “Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire.” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 52, no. 3/4, 2013, pp. 22–31. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43155514.

Playboy: a portfolio of art and satire, 1919-1924. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Playboy: a portfolio of art and satire, no. 1, 1919 January. Playboy: a portfolio of art and satire, 1919-1924. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Compiled by Severine Stier and Claire Biggerstaff (Class of ’19, Davidson College)

Title:
The Papyrus: A Magazine of Individuality
Absorbed Whim (Feb. 1905)
Superseded by The Phoenix

Date of Publication: 
July 1903 – May 1912
On hiatus Apr. – May 1904; Sept. 1906 – June 1907; Mar. – Oct. 1910

Place(s) of Publication: 
Mount Vernon, NY (July 1903 – Aug. 1904)
Somerville, NJ (Sept. 1904 – Feb. 1905)
Cranford, NJ (Mar. 1905 – Apr. 1906)
Elizabeth, NJ (May 1906 – Aug. 1906)
East Orange, NJ (July 1907 – Feb. 1910)
New York, NY (Nov. 1910 – May 1912)

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher:
Alban Publishing Company (July 1903 – Feb. 1905)
Michael Monahan (Mar. 1905 – Feb. 1910)
Mitchell Kennerley (Nov. 1910 – May 1912)

Physical Description: 
5″ x 7,” typically 32 pages of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Occasional illustrations (mostly in first two volumes). Advertisements confined to beginning and end of each issue.

Price:
10 cents per issue / $1 per year / $10 for lifetime subscription

Editor(s): 
Michael Monahan

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Original Issues:
The Huntington Library’s website reports having a complete run of the magazine and notes that “it is very unlikely that another complete set has been collected” (“The Papyrus”). Other libraries with mostly complete runs include Davidson College, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, and Cornell University.
Scans of all issues are available online from HathiTrust.

Reprint Editions:
Unknown

The Papyrus was a little magazine published between 1903 and 1912 under the editorship of Michael Monahan. It catered to a distinctly intellectual audience with an interest in literature; its content included poetry, short fiction, literary criticism, and comments on current events.

The character of the magazine is inextricable from the personality of its editor, as Monahan had almost complete discretion in selecting the magazine’s content. The Papyrus often served directly as a voice for Monahan’s own opinions, and he would often supply more of his own content for an issue than any other single contributor. A sense of occasion and verbal poise attended Monahan’s writing. Take, for example, his comments on the global trend against monarchal rule:

“Some time ago I wrote that it was summer with the kings, but wondrous is the change wrought within a few short months.  Now instead of golden summer… there is winter black with dread, lurid with rebellion and sinister with every threat of treason and anarchy….  No heart of grace do the kings find in the thickness of the encompassing walls or the yet unbroken ranks of their soldiery.  For every wind is now the courier of some new treason or blow at their power…. It is marvelous how loyalty deserts a falling king! …

“It is winter with the kings, but summer with the peoples who have waited long enough for their turn.  Lustily are they girded up and made ready for the gleaning.  Boldly and unitedly they march upon the ripe and waiting fields which, so often sowed with their blood and sweat, they now claim for their own.  God grant they may bring the harvest home!” (January 1905, 1-3).

Besides being characterized by such soaring rhetoric, Papyrus proudly offered a haven for high-browed intellectuals, such as the friend of the editor who wrote:

“My Dear Michael: Your book reaches me so promptly after our happy meeting and verifies the old saying, Bis dat qui cito dat.  (And what a satisfaction it is to be able to quote Latin without fear of seeming like an alien and a pedant!  Oh, the vast desert of fatuous, facetious, and vulgar illiteracy, which seems to be so sadly inseparable from that democracy of which we expect so much!  But can democracy produce or even tolerate distinction?  Is it inevitable that we should speak only the jargon of Broadway?)” (January 1909, 6).

Monahan tenaciously saw The Papyrus through an entire run of nine years and eighty-one issues (continuing it afterward as the Phoenix). The Papyrus shares the fiercely independent spirit of so many of its contemporary little magazines. It holds a unique place within this group, however, owing to the decidedly mixed social values of its editor. Monahan championed ideals of liberty and the rights of the working class, and he eloquently decried the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in Papyrus’ May 1905 issue (1-5). At the same time, however, Monahan was proudly a literary elitist who, judging by the content of his magazine, had no interest whatsoever in the stylistic innovation typically seen as characterizing modernism.  MacLeod’s description of his “old-school learned man-of-letters persona” is spot on (156). Furthermore, Monahan’s obituary described him as a crusader against feminism and noted that he complained specifically about female writers, despite being married to one (“Michael Monahan, Scholar”).

Issues of the magazine were printed entirely in black and white, except for the color red, which was used on the outside covers.  Three different cover designs were used during the magazine’s run: papyri and a scroll from July 1903 to October 1904; flowers from November 1904 to December 1905, and papyri in a fan shape from January 1906 to May 1912. The table of contents was always found on the inside front cover. There were approximately four pages of advertisements at the beginning and end of each issue; between these the content was entirely text with the rare exception of a picture or illustration (most of these appeared in the first two volumes). Witty or thought-provoking quotations from the editor sometimes followed the magazine’s larger pieces. Advertisements were usually for literary productions, including other magazines, books by Monahan or other authors, and bound volumes of Papyrus. The outside back cover held only a single quotation from Monahan, one of the magazine’s contributors, or an important literary figure.

The following manifesto appeared on the inside back cover of Papyrus from its first issue through volume 7, issue 1:

“The Papyrus has none of the Stock Features of the Other magazines, which make them All so fearfully Alike.

It does not propose to review the Futile Fiction of the hour.

It is for people who want to get away from the Eternal Trite–who are sick and tired of Canned Literature–who demand Thinking that is born of the Red Corpuscle.

It is also intended for persons who are Young enough to Understand and all others who do not easily get into a Panic for some one to Blow out the Light.

The Editor of The Papyrus is a Free Agent–which means that he is not controlled by Officious Friends, Advertising Patrons, or any other Influence subversive of the Chosen Policy of the Magazine.

Briefly, that policy is–

Fearless thinking and Honest writing.

Hatred of Sham and Fake under whatever forms they may appear.

The American ideal.

The true literary spirit.

And a sane Philosophy of Life helping us all to bear our burden.”

Michael Monahan (Apr. 6, 1865 – Nov. 32, 1933)
Editor: (1904 – 1914)

The Papyrus was the creation of Michael Monahan, who served as its only editor, and, for most of the magazine’s life, both owner and publisher (Publication shifted to Mitchell Kinnerley with the November 1910 issue). Monahan emigrated from Ireland to the United States when he was young. He received education from his father, whom The New York Times described as “a classical scholar.” Before beginning editorship of Papyrus Monahan worked for a newspaper in Albany, for the Democratic National Convention, and in the mayor of Albany’s office. In 1900 he went to Elbert Hubbard’s East New York colony, where he contributed to and assisted in editing The Philistine. By 1903 Monahan had tired of Hubbard (even, according to one rumor, kicking him down a flight of stairs) and moved to New York, where he founded The Papyrus in 1904 (Smith 25).

He began editorship of The Papyrus around the age of thirty eight (“Michael Monahan, Scholar”). Maintaining the magazine was, at times, a financially strenuous position; Monahan was the father of twelve but managed to support his family mainly with Papyrus’ sales (MacLeod 155-157). Monahan had a dramatic writing style, which he employed extensively in The Papyrus to decry what he saw as “the Futile Fiction of the hour” and “Sham and Fake under whatever forms they may appear” (see Papyrus’ manifesto).

Edwin Markham
“Semiramis” – July 1903

Ernest Crosby
“Tolstoy” – November 1908

Richard Le Gallienne
“At Elim are Twelve Wells” – April 1906

William Ernest Henley
“The Past was Goodly Once” – August 1904
“In Old Japan” – November 1907

Lafcadio Hearn
“A Daughter of Samurai” – November 1907

Percival Pollard
“In Memory of a Country Doctor” – September 1904

George Sylvester Viereck
“The Haunted House” – August 1907

“Editors of Individual Magazines.” Bruno’s Weekly 30 Sept. 1916: 1120-1122. Blue Mountain Project. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Goode, Stephen H., comp. Index to American Little Magazines, 1900-1910. Vol. 2. New York: Whitston, 1974. Print.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. New York: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

Le Gallienne, Richard. Michael Monahan: An Appreciation. New York: Printery of the Phoenix, 1914. HathiTrust. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.

MacLeod, Kirsten J. The Other Magazine Revolution: American Little Magazines and Fin-de-Siecle Print Culture, 1894-1904. MA Thesis. University of Alberta, 2009. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

“Michael Monahan, Scholar, Dies at Sixty Eight.” The New York Times 23 Nov. 1933: 21. ProQuest. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.

“Michael Monahan: The Survivor of a Disappearing Art.” Current Literature Mar. 1912: 347-349. ProQuest. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

Papyrus. HathiTrust Digital Library. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.

“The Papyrus: A Magazine of Individuality.” Huntington Library Catalog. The Huntington, n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.

Smith, Herbert F. “Michael Monahan and His Little Known Little Magazine.” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 24.1 (1960): 24-28. Rutgers. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

“The Papyrus” compiled by Wade Morgan (Class of ’16, Davidson College)

Title:
Pagany: A Native Quarterly 

Date of Publication: 
Jan. 1930 – Mar. 1933

Place(s) of Publication:
Boston & New York City

Frequency of Publication: 
Quarterly

Circulation:
~1,000 initially printed

Publisher: 
Self-published by editor Richard Johns

Physical Description: 
Roughly 9″ x 6″. Soft cover with a total run of three volumes. Each volume was comprised of four separate “numbers” with roughly 150 pages per number. The cover varied in color but always included the Pagany title in a black text, the titular symbol designed by Virginia Lee Burton (a tree with fruit, surrounded by a fence), followed by a list of all of the contributors in the same, capitalized type and size to symbolize equal importance. Each page allowed for forty-two lines of text with a long running line of type along the margins. There were no illustrations.

Editor(s): 
Richard Johns

Associate Editor(s):
Sherry Mangan

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of Delaware Library; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Repository; Davidson College Library (microform)

Reprint Editions: 
Halpert, Stephen and Richard Johns, editors. A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine, 1929-1932, Beacon Press, 1969.

Announcement by editor Richard Johns:

“A new magazine should announce a reason for existence”: PAGANY, perhaps, more than another, for it will avoid any attempt to seek a standard, it is neither entering into connexion nor competition with any magazine trying to make a point, to formulate a policy. There is much danger in such freedom, in leaving unarticulated one or two precepts of editorial limitation. Yet even a hint of regimen is made impossible by the connotations of the title.

Pagus is a broad term, meaning any sort of collection of peoples from the smallest district or village to the country as an inclusive whole. Taking America as the pagus, anyone of us as the paganus, the inhabitant, and our conceptions, our agreements and disagreements, our ideas, ideals, whatever we have to articulate is pagany, our expression.

This Native Quarterly is representative of a diverse and ungrouped body of spokesmen, bound geographically. Wary of definite alliance with any formulated standard, PAGANY (as an enclosure) includes individual expression of native thought and emotion.

Manifesto by Williams Carlos Williams:

“The ghosts so confidently laid by Francis Bacon and his followers are again walking in the laboratory as well as beside the man in the street,” the scientific age is drawing to a close. Bizarre derivations multiple about us, mystifying and untrue as — an automatic revolver. To what shall the mind turn for that with which to rehabilitate our thought and our lives? To the word, a meaning hardly distinguishable from that of place, in whose great, virtuous and at present little realized potency we hereby manifest our belief.

Announcement and Manifesto are quoted as they appear in Pagany Volume 1, Number 1 (1930).

Richard Johns (Oct. 29, 1904- Jun. 17, 1970)
Editor: 1930-1933

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Richard Johns (1904-1970) was the son of a wealthy Boston attorney (Brooker 259). After failing to complete high school, Johns published several of his poems in small literary magazines in New York and Boston (Halpert 7). While in New York, Johns occasionally studied literature at Columbia University, and became acquainted William Carlos Williams’ short-lived but influential magazine Contact, which ran from 1920 to 1921 (Halpert 7). In 1929, at the age of twenty-four, Johns wrote to Williams with an idea for a little magazine called Pagany, a title borrowed from Williams’ 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany (Brooker 259). Though William’s gave Johns his blessing to use the title, he declined to serve as a co-editor, instead preferring to offer informal advice (Halpert 6).

Armed with a fifteen hundred dollar loan from his father, Johns printed 1,000 copies of Pagany in its first run, and devoted the next three years of his life to the magazine (Halpert 34). Johns operated under an “American only” policy, hoping to celebrate and explore American poetry and literature. In 1931, Johns relocated the magazine to Manhattan, allowing him to expand his literary circles. Johns contributed a number of poems and other literary works to Pagany throughout its run (Halpert 211).

Johns’ father died in 1932, significantly decreasing John’s funds (Halpert 423). Coupled with the Great Depression, Pagany’s run ended after a belated February 1932 publication (Brooker 265). In 1934 Johns married Veronica Parker, collaborating with her on a series of mystery novels before moving to Cuttingsville, Vermont, where he worked as a photographer and horticulturist (Halpert 501). Johns died in October of 1970.

Richard Johns
“Solstice”
“The Tempering”
“‘Your Life, Sir!’”
“Recognition”

William Carlos Williams
“The Work of Gertrude Stein”
“Four Bottles of Beer”
“Flowers by the Sea”
“Sea-Trout and Butterfish”
White Mule

Kenneth Rexroth
“Into the Shady Westerness”

Gertrude Stein
“Five Words in a Line”
“Advertisement”

Horace Gregory
“Longface Mahoney Discusses Heaven”

Janet Lewis
“The Still Afternoon”

Eskrine Caldwell
“A Swell-Looking Girl”
“Perhaps Only”
“Inspiration for Greatness”
“The Empty Room”
“Warm River”
“After-Image”
“The First Autumn”

Yvor Winters
“Strength Out of Sweetness”
“Snow-Ghost”
“The Journey”

Mina Loy
“The Widow’s Jazz”
“Lady Laura in Bohemia”

Ezra Pound
“Three Cantos”

e.e. cummings
“Six Poems”

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, editors. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960. Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

Halpert, Stephen and Richard Johns, editors. A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine, 1929-1932. Beacon Press, 1969. Print.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton University Press, 1947. Print.

Compiled by Hannah Sommerlad (Class of ’19, Davidson College) and Annie Maisel (Class of ’19, Davidson College)