The Price of Publishing Modernism

When Ezra Pound began his association with the little magazine Poetry in 1912, he wrote to tell its editor, Harriet Monroe, that her plan for a publication “seems not only sound, but the only possible method. There is no other magazine in America which is not an insult to the serious artist and to the dignity of his art” (Paige 43–44). Published in Chicago, Poetry was a death knell for the genteel literary preten­sions of high-circulation magazines in the United States. But while Pound sug­gested to Monroe that it was not “any of the artist’s business whether or not he circulates,” he confessed that he too had been “nevertheless tempted, on the verge of starting a quarterly” (43–44). By this time, of course, the poet was well estab­lished in Europe, and over the subsequent decade he would rely heavily upon magazines like Blast, the Dial, the Egoist, the English Review, the Little Review, and the New Age to print his work. But it would be fifteen years before Pound edited his own magazine: four numbers of the Exile appeared between the spring of 1927 and the autumn of 1928 while the poet lived in Rapallo, Italy

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