Class, Thursday 5 Nov, 2014

Manifestos and pioneers

In this unit we will discuss the nature of manifestoes, a modernist genre par excellence, which emerged
among other publications, as a critical vehicle for introducing modernist writers and artists to the
public. The desire to construct the tastes of one's audience was evident in the rhetoric of manifestos
themselves.

Writing in 1919, critic Louis Untermeyer reflected that "poetry was enjoying 'boom times'" in the
second decade of the century:
Poetry magazines were breaking out everywhere. Prizes were blossoming on every bush;
anthologies were thicker than office-seekers in Washington or Webster's Unabridged
Dictionary. It was the time of manifestos, movements, departures, schools. The Cubists,
Futurists, Imagists, Impressionists, Vorticists had all taken a hand at rejuvenating the sad and
perplexed Muse." (Untermeyer 1919, 320)
In this highly competitive atmosphere, throwaway publications emerged as critical vehicles for
introducing modernist writers and artists to the public. The ephemera of magazines, broadsides and
manifestos in many ways reflected the evanescence of Dada and Imagism themselves, movements
which stressed the fleeting nature of artistic representation (Tashjian 1975,12). More complex than a
passing fad, the proliferation of manifestos in the early years of the 20th century suggests the
modernist artist's efforts to prevent marginalization by the corporate economy that has predominated
in England and America since roughly the 1890s (Larson 1977, xvii-xviii). If we view professionals
as knowledge-based groups concerned with self-legitimation, treatises such as the Vorticist manifestos
of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, Mina Loy's "Feminist Manifesto," and the numerous Futurist
manifestos responded to this perceived threat by elaborating uniquely modernist approaches to the
problem of group identity The manifestos' coinage of terms such as "vortex" and "psycho-democracy"
formulated exclusionary discourses, while the identification of appropriate artistic influences
circumscribed the credentials by which an artist's prestige could be evaluated and regulated. Likewise,
modernist manifestos asserted the artistcritic's authority through the defamiliarization of conventional
prestige symbols such as the museum and the university. Perhaps most revealingly, they often
encouraged their readers to question both the fixity of language systems and the validity of the social
and cultural institutions those systems produce.
Despite their radical postures, many modernist artists were mindful of their vulnerability to the
vicissitudes of literary fashion and the marketplace generally; rather than conforming to existing
institutions, they worked to establish their own. Such efforts reflected their recognition that
canonization is a retrospective practice, one largely dependent on the cooperation of academic
institutions and mass market media. As Lawrence Rainey has argued, mass market anthologies such
as the Anthology of American Verse, publications like the Times Literary Supplement, Random
House's nascent Modern Library Collection, and indeed the entire academic/literary industry New
Criticism evolved out of high modernists' desire to "guarantee a degree of permanence" for their own
aesthetic affiliations. Modernists like Eliot, Rainey posits, were particularly concerned with
"legitimizing modernism, staking hegemonic position in the institution of literature. Thus, as the
publication histories of Pound's limited editions of the Cantos and of Eliot's The Waste Land reveal,

modernist publications' merits did not "reside in a specific set of words, or text, but in [their] capacity
to articulate this collective aspiration of an elite" (Rainey 1989b, 284).1
Such aspirations surfaced most distinctly in the manifestos or treatises that appeared in little
magazines. Use of the term manifesto is here inclusive, largely in deference to the artists' own
evasiveness. In The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli suggests "manifesto" denotes
"documents giving aesthetic and artistic precepts, 'programs' to indicate the more general and wide
ranging declarations, visions, or overviews" (Poggioli 1968, 3). The "manifestos" that appeared in
little magazines addressed both social and aesthetic concerns, often explicitly linking the two; they
worked to justify modern art, the modern artist or the mission of the journals in which they appeared.
Insofar as manifestos articulated and enforced socio-aesthetic goals, many of the critical essays
printed in magazines qualify as manifestos. Masthead mottoes likewise functioned as descriptive
programs. Finally, we should not limit our use of the term to prose works alone, since some of the
most influential and innovative manifestos appeared as poetry and prose poems. Artists' use of similar
venues, however, did not render their politics coincident; some manifestos replaced existing value
systems with the authors' own regulatory practices, while others attempted to debunk the notion of
viable value systems altogether.
An examination of the manifesto as a genre reveals an evolution from the Romantic critic, who saw
his artistic role as a vocation or calling, into the more aggressive modernist critic, who asserted his
role as a professional, one who publicly declared his position. Arguably the first modern English
artistic manifesto, Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads expressed the enthusiasm with which
artists viewed the French Revolution and other political developments, as well as the Romantic
optimism regarding human potential. The preface described the poet as an individual who is
"motivated by and affirms the primal human values," a visionary who is "habitually impelled to create
[volitions and passions] where he does not find them" (Mack 1996, 1388). In striking contrast,
modernist manifestos generally privileged the artist's agency over the artistic "impulse." Their
relationship to existing cultural institutions was often rather tenuous; nevertheless, the authors of these
manifestos employed many traditional means of professional self-legitimation. While T. S. Eliot
attached footnotes to The Waste Land and James Joyce asserted his authority by re-writing a seminal
classical text, the manifestos stand as perhaps the most aggressive attempts to professionalize modern
art. Along with acknowledging the imperative of cultivating a receptive audience, these manifestos all
exercised three strategies employed by nascent professionals seeking self-legitimation (as identified
by sociologist Rolf Torstendahl): interdiction, articulation of the distinction between reason and
madness, and the policing of boundaries between truth and falsity.
Most immediately, modernist manifestos conveyed the artists' recognition of the need to foster a
receptive public. In their efforts to advance a vigorous defense of avant-garde developments,
modernist manifestos were premised on the assumption that the public "is not always anxious to
receive new ideas" (Hoffman 1946, 193). Barry Alpert argues that modernist criticism served the
important function of familiarizing its readers with avant-garde psychology. Little magazine editors
often operated on the assumption that the public audience,
can only become accustomed to this "peculiar moderness" if it is described in lucid prose. Once they
have acquired a mental construction, which will give a provisional assent to the donne of the avantgarde, the public will begin to understand even the most obscurely couched creations. (Alpert 171,1011)
The desire to construct the tastes of one's audience was evident in the rhetoric of manifestos
themselves. In an article titled "The Prose of Frederic Manning," for example, The Egoist's assistant
editor Richard Aldington expressed his desire to work out the "original, sincere criticism [which]
could determine the literary taste of the next twenty years" (Aldington 1914, 375). Editorials in The
Little Review strove to legitimize artistic commentary, asserting that both critical writing and
modernist art itself can be useful to the public (Marek 1995, 67). Democratic publications used

generously eclectic editorial policies and inclusive manifestos to foster a readership receptive to
aesthetic innovation.
Like the iconoclastic artists themselves, manifestos differed widely in political and aesthetic
orientations, and they varied considerably on whether the magazine is a venue for the interests of its
editors, its contributors, or its audience. The simple fact that a manifesto appeared in a magazine's
pages did not necessitate that the editors espoused those tenets; many magazines printed conflicting
manifestos in the same issue, and many editors voiced objections to the aesthetic creeds published in
their own journals. The profusion of manifestos is itself significant, however, since it reveals a
pervasive concern with advancing the artist's status within a commercial economy
Some journal editors exploited the various radical potentials of the little magazine venue, while others
used their publications to achieve the very exclusivity they professed to deconstruct. Scofield Thayer
told his managing editor at the Dial that he wanted the journal to publish works that "have aesthetic
value and are not commercially suicidal" (qtd. in Rainey 1989b, 297); in stark contrast, the editors of
The Little Review dealt explicitly with controversial social issues and adopted the aggressive motto:
"We will brook no compromise with public taste." In keeping with the artistic dialogia of the 1910s
and early 1920s, many editors and manifestists extended general invitations to "the best new writing"
and art, regardless of a work's popularity or its standing in conventional critical circles. As editor of
The Little Review, Margaret Anderson issued an open invitation to prose writers: "You must know
English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite
frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or
uninteresting magazines; and you must be true" (Anderson 1915, 4). Even less discriminating than
Anderson's journal, the first issue of The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp and Henri PierreRoche, included a general summons to potential contributors at the bottom of the cover: "The second
number of The Blind Man will appear as soon as YOU have sent sufficient material for it." Others
editors offered a concise, inclusive motto that both acknowledged literary tradition and invited
alternative perspectives: "The old expressions are always with us, and there are always others."2 For
the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, art must "encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner
be forced to struggle with himself and with the person in the picture"; the work of art, he argued, has
value only in its ability to relate meaningfully to the spectator and to other works of art (Chipp 1968,
296).
Conversely, other journals actively discouraged the "man in the street" from participating in the
artistic dialogue. Eugene Jolas's pronouncement in the Paris-based journal transition, "THE PLAIN
READER BE DAMNED," dismissed not only the casual reader but also, according to Richard
Masteller, the entire "dominant American culture, manifest in its capitalistic system and its plutocratic
oligarchy" (1997, 25). As such, his manifesto reflected Pound's haughty dictum in The Egoist:
Damn the man in the street, once and for all . . . damn the man in the street who is only in the street
because he hasn't intelligence enough to be let in anywhere else, and who does not in the least respect
himself for being in the street, and more than an artist would respect himself for being hung in the
Royal Academy (Pound 1914b, 233)
Circumscribing the appropriate subject matter for the professional artist-critic, The Egoist was
conspicuous in its desire to avoid the messy realities of politics. In an article about women's suffrage,
Bastien von Helmholtz stated quite plainly that politics had no place in art:
The duty of literate men and of all women is to keep alight some spark of civilization at the
summit of things. It is the duty of everyone who is intelligent enough to read this paper to
spend his or her energies setting some model of life to the rabble and to ages to come. It is not
our duty to fuss about Sunday closing or minimum wage or any other attempt to make hell less
hell-like for the lower classes. (Suffragettes 1914, 254-55)

Rather than endorsing any political cause, von Helmholtz argued, magazine editors and contributors
(and indeed all artists) should see themselves as crusading martyrs who strive to preserve what is
good and noble in western culture: "The enlightened man should foregather with other enlightened
men and plot for the preservation of enlightenment. That is to say, he should form his syndicate" (von
Helmholtz 1914, 255). Pound's essay in Poetry's 20th Birthday Number asserted that magazines like
Poetry "ought to feed and publish the very few people whose work makes them worth feeding and
printing"; in a half-hearted gesture toward egalitarianism, he conceded "It]here will naturally be a
personal variant in opinion as to who and how many these are, but there are limits to respectable
failure.... There are things in America that no amount of humanitarianism and sentimentalism can
excuse" (1932, 42). Such gestures enacted self-legitimation by delineating value systems for judging
the contemporary artist.
As the examples above convey many painters, poets and critics fought for professional status while
simultaneously erasing the historical peculiarities of their own self-legitimation, effectively effacing
their own stake in the project. In this way, their efforts perform Pierre Bourdieu's argument that the art
business itself is a kind of lie, a "trade in things that have no price" (1993, 74). Edward Bishop's essay,
"(Re)Covering Modernism," applies Bourdieu's observations to the little magazine scene, noting the
mutually sustaining relationship between symbolic and economic capital:
Along with the pursuit of economic capital goes the pursuit of "symbolic capital," for in fact it
is through the accumulation of symbolic capital that one acquires economic capital. For the
publisher the aim is to acquire a name for him or herself, for with that goes the power to
"consecrate" cultural objects, to give them symbolic value, and thus to appropriate the profits
from this. (Bishop 1996, 290)
Thus the legitimacy and financial success of the art business depend not only upon symbolic capital,
but also upon a duality of disinterestedness and self-interest: "these practices, functioning as practical
negations, can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing" (Bourdieu 1993, 74). In
"Data," an overview of the market that appeared in the final issue of his journal The Exile, Pound
practiced this kind of erasure when he roughly divided the history of little magazines into two
categories: irrelevant ephemera, and the periodicals in which "contemporary americo-english noncommercial literature struggled into being" (1928, 104). Both Pound's list of respectable journals
there, and "Small Magazines," his later canonizing efforts in The English Journal, memorialized only
the journals in which his own work appeared, or those with which he had a substantial editorial
relationship: The English Review, The Egoist, Poetry, The Little Review, the Dial, The Transatlantic
Review, and The Exile.
Such retrospective analyses of the little magazine articles maximized what Bourdieu calls the "quasimagical potency of the signature and the signifier," a potency that, by 1922 Eliot had acquired, in no
small part thanks to Pound, but which was further enhanced by the Dial. Under the guise of New
Critical "objective" criticism, overviews like Pound's "Data" and "Small Magazines" manifested
authorial concern with accumulating a specific kind of symbolic capital-that which would guarantee a
degree of permanence for an artist's own work and aesthetic affinities. As in Pound's limited editions
of the Cantos, magazines like The Egoist used rhetoric and format in an attempt to shed historical or
socially grounded meanings; the manifestos authenticated themselves insofar as they shunned the
merely conventional or "historical" form of the commercial magazine (Rainey 1989). Such strategies
underscored the elitist inflection in some strains of modernisms; they testified both to the desire to
address a select audience in venues "uncontaminated" by the commercial production of discourse, and
to the calculated determination to accrue symbolic capital for the professional artist-critic.
The subterfuge inherent in the art business, combined with the artist's self-consciousness about his
potential erasure by the commercial economy, motivated what was perhaps the modernist manifestos'
most distinct characteristic (and Torstendahl's third professionalizing strategy): distinguishing
between truth and falsity Relatively distant from the economic and ideological constraints of mass

circulation, the manifestos offered a space to interrogate and disrupt claims to truth, such as the
assumption that politics and high art are mutually exclusive categories, or that form and content are
separate concerns. Even the most visually oriented little magazines stressed the importance of
criticism as a means to two related ends: explaining the journals' content to readers, and attacking the
falsities of both Victorian and modern consumer culture. In his article praising Frederic Manning in
The Egoist, for example, Aldington argued,
There is not the faintest suspicion of charlatanism-with which so many of our writers are tainted-in
any of his essays. He is always perfectly sincere, his views are mostly in accord with his main
philosophy-I mean that he has no incoherences, no blatant contradictions, signs of fundamental
insincerity--and he is often as original as a man can be in a world where nothing is new. (Aldington
1914, 375)
The "Notice to Readers" that appeared in the final December 1919 issue of The Egoist similarly
underscored the need for a criticism that would root out the sham artist:
A test must be applied which will separate the genuine from the make-believe. That test in our
opinion is clarity. . . . Hence to establish intellectual curiosity in a front place in men's interest,
it is necessary in the first instance to get rid of the pseudo-intellectuals and the poseurs.
("Notice" 1919, 71)
A blurb below this "Notice" recommended Wyndham Lewis's The Calif s Design as a "forcible
indictment of dilettantism in painting and of pretentiousness and insincerity in modern art and
architecture" (Notice, 1919, 71).
Elsewhere in the publication spectrum, manifestos actively celebrated exposure of the lies inherent in
both high modernism and consumer culture. Others editor Alfred Kreymborg addressed this common
concern with conspicuous artifice when he argued that many of the contributors to little magazines,
had the deep virtue, at a time when such virtue was needed, of stripping Americans of their self
delusion. They now saw themselves not as a community of helpful democrats, devoted to the loftiest
ideals, but as a heterogeneous clan of weaklings, fakers, egoists, lovers, haters, hypocrites; little men
and women. The severity of the dose was a tonic to the self-complacent consciousness. ( Kreymborg
1929, 380)
Margaret Anderson articulated her own interest in exposing falsehood in the May 1915 issue of The
Little Review, where she announced that each issue of her journal would henceforth include "a special
article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life" (Anderson 1915, 4). Pound, who served for a
time as Poetry's European editor, aggressively attacked Harriet Monroe's "Open Door" policy,
asserting that little magazines had a responsibility to distinguish between genuine artistry and what he
and Eliot called the "sham" artist. He complained to Alice Corbin Henderson, "En effect W.B.Y. and
myself seem to have been shove[d) in with a lot of shisters and amateurs [in Poetry's pages. at least
that's the general effect. and provincial shisters at that" (qtd. in Marek 1995, 186).
The most dynamic manifestos and journals applied a principle of rupture not only to individual
language events, but also to reified codes and value systems (105). Eugene Jolas, for example,
challenged assumptions of linguistic immutability in a manifesto published in transition:
Revolution of Language
(1) An attitude which regards modern language as inadequate for the expression of the changing
background of the world, and which posits the necessity of a radical revision of its
communicative and symbolical functions.

(2) It regards both the individual creator and the collective folk speech as mediumistic
instruments for bringing about the change.
(3) It envisages creative language as a pre-rational process. (Rothenberg 1974,148-49)
Despite his elitist approach to the "common reader," Jolas's valorization of "collective folk speech"
here articulated the Dada belief in the creation of art as a democratic process; more importantly, his
skepticism of the signifier was apparent in his call for a revision of language's "communicative and
symbolical functions." In a similar vein, transition's artistic bill of rights, "Proclamation," asserted the
"literary creator's right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and
dictionaries," as well as the "right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing
grammatical and syntactical laws" (150). In contrast to Symbolist artists like Matisse, who maintained
that "there is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to
be represented," the Dadaists contended the only "truths" are the ones the artist and his audience
construct (Chipp 1968, 137); they viewed art not as the creation of beauty, but rather as a making, a
mode of invention (and intervention). The quotations above clearly indicate paradoxical and
conflicting understandings of which falsehoods represented the greatest danger. While Pound used the
metaphor of the "shister" in order to control the boundaries of the fledgling institution of modernism,
twice-alienated writers like Mina Loy trained their rhetorical guns on the lies more mainstream
writers often overlooked: sexism, war-mongering, and the art industry itself.
F. T. Marinetti's "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" ignited a firestorm when it appeared
February 20, 1909 on the front page of the Parisian journal, Le Figaro.3 Together with the subsequent
"Manifestos of Futurist Painters," and "Futurist Painting: A Technical Manifesto," that later appeared
in the Florentine Lacerba, the original Futurist doctrine established the strident tone and aggressive
style that soon became the standard for artistic treatises. Crafted as a promotion for the first Futurist
painting exhibition in Milan (April 1911), the "Foundation" used the first person plural to assert its
collective authority, and identified Futurist artists as prophets, "alert and upright like magnificent
beacons and advance guard posts confronting the army of enemy stars" (Chipp 1968, 281).Along with
their valorization of the industrialized city, war and technology, these essays identified the Futurists as
the only truth-tellers courageous enough to attack the "false law of gravity," the "false classics," and
the "false claims" of competing artistic movements. The Futurist obsession with distinguishing truth
from falsehood led Marinetti to call for the abolition of "the truths learned in schools," and to assert
that "what was truth for the painters of yesterday is but falsehood today" (289). Carlo Carra echoed
this sentiment in his 1913 "From Cezanne to Us, the Futurists" when he argued that the Futurists
opposed "the falsehood of the fixed law of the gravity of bodies: for Futurist painting, bodies will
respond to the special center of gravity of the painting itself" (302).
The Futurist artists were particularly hostile toward institutions, both Victorian and modern, they
deemed moribund. Anticipating Pound's characterization of western civilization as "an old bitch gone
in the teeth," Marinetti asserted that museums should receive only cursory respect, "as one visits the
grave of dead relatives, once a year":
Museums, cemeteries! . . . Identical truly, in the sinister promiscuousness of so many objects
unknown to each other. Public dormitories, where one is forever slumbering beside hated or
unknown beings. Reciprocal ferocity of painters and sculptors murdering each other with blows
of form and color in the same museum. (Chipp 1968, 287)
He predicted that the artists of the future would turn such violence back on institutions themselves:
"We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian
cowardice." The 1914 Futurist manifesto signed by Boccioni, Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla,
and Gino Severini specifically attacked the new schools for their failure to fully reject older
institutions. Futurists will use all their might, they asserted, "AGAINST THE FALSE CLAIMS TO
BELONG TO THE FUTURE PUT FORWARD BY THE SECESSIONISTS AND THE

INDEPENDENTS,WHO HAVE INSTALLED NEW ACADEMIES NO LESS TRITE AND

ATTACHED TO ROUTINE THAN THE PRECEDING ONES" (293). In the catalogue for the
Futurist exhibition that opened at Bernheim Jeune in Paris in February 1912 (then circulated
throughout Europe), the signatories declared that "all the truths learned in schools or in the studios are
abolished for us" (294). Once these "shisters" were exposed, the Futurists anticipated, "the public will
no longer be scandalized and shout, because they would no longer be afraid that they were being
tricked and would understand the new truth that we have agitated for in Italy and elsewhere . . . a truth
that has thrown the camp of painting into revolution" (308). As was typical of many modernist
manifestos, Marinetti inverted accepted value systems, demanding that "the name of 'Madman' [,]
with which it is attempted to bag all innovations[,] should be looked upon as a title of honor" (292).
Despite such lofty ambitions, the Futurists' idiosyncratic nihilism swiftly rendered their art available
to conscription by fascist politicians; the movement folded once World War I depleted its ranks,
revealing the limits and dangers of techno-idolatry.
The didactic essays published in the English journal BLAST appear to be in direct dialogue with both
the rhetoric and the content of the Futurist doctrines. BLAST has lately been seen as a counterpart to
Russian Futurism, although co-producers Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound expressed more interest in
the aesthetic doctrines of Futurism than in the Futurist obsession with technology. Pound chose an
eclectic approach for the journal, which he described to James Joyce as "a new Futurist, Cubist,
Imagist quarterly" (Perloff 1986, 175). In the first, June 1914 issue of BLAST, Lewis included a short
but revealing addendum to the manifestos that appear there: "All these things are very obvious."
Lewis's ennui here helped to disguise his participation in the wider effort to circumscribe the
characteristics of a new kind of artist-critic. Clearly competing with the Futurists for social and
cultural capital, Lewis and Pound wrote of Marinetti's movement in the past tense, dismissing it as "a
picturesque, superficial and romantic rebellion of young Milanese painters against the Academism
which surrounded them" (Pound 1914a, 143). Given the general modernist fascination with novelty,
the BLAST writers opted for an incisive strategy when they accused the nascent movement of having
already outlived its function: "Cannot Marinetti, sensible and energetic man that he is, be induced to
throw over this sentimental rubbish about Automobiles and Aeroplanes? . . . Unless he wants to
become a rapidly fossilizing monument of puerility, cheap reaction and sensationalism, he had better
do so" (144). BLASTs vituperative attacks on Marinetti, however, could not fully obscure the
magazine's debt to Futurism, nor did they convincingly articulate a professionalizing agenda distinct
from the Italians'. Like Marinetti's essays, the authors of the BLAST manifestos attempted to
legitimize their position by attacking their opponents as "absurd" reactionaries; similarly, their
obsession with distinguishing falsity from truth was every bit as prominent as the Futurists'. Lewis,
for example, claimed to "whisper in your ear a great secret," and assailed the "pig plagiarism" of
French artistic convention. Imitating the Futurists' arrogant posture and totalizing discourse, BLAST
proclaimed, "There is one Truth, ourselves, and everything is permitted./ But we are not Templars./
We are proud, handsome and predatory" (Lewis 1915b, 148). Mimicking the Futurist lexicon's
adoption/redefinition of "Dynamism," "force lines," and "physical transcendentalism," Pound and
Lewis coined terms such as "vortex," "primary pigment," and "logopoeia" to control the dissemination
of ideas.
The BLAST manifestos, however, did exhibit a more sophisticated use of rhetoric than their Futurist
counterparts. Whereas the Futurist tracts tended to be rather sweeping in their indictment of
convention, Pound and Lewis displayed more sensitivity to the ways in which market concerns
influence cultural production. They were more incisive in their attacks on specific cultural institutions,
and they were particularly vocal in criticizing the timidity they saw among mainstream publishing
houses. "The task we have set for ourselves," they wrote, is "to make the rich of the community shed
their education skin, to destroy politeness, standardization and academic, that is civilized, vision"
(Pound and Lewis 1914b, 12). Eschewing their rivals' impulsive tone, Pound and Lewis appropriated
the authoritative rhetoric of the very institutions they sought to disable. The BLAST manifestos
commanded the reader to either "CURSE," "BLAST" or "BLESS" long lists of people, places, and
products. The breath-taking arbitrariness of these itemized lists cooperated with their audacious

biblical imperatives, "Be Thyself" and "Long Live the Vortex" and with Pound's totalizing assertion
that "All experience rushes into this vortex" (Pound 1915, 153-54).The tone of these essays was both
paternal and self-mystifying: "You must catch the clearness and logic in the midst of contradictions:
not settle down and snooze on an acquired, easily possessed and mastered, satisfying shape" (Lewis
1915c, 91). Pound had established the foundation for such aggressive rhetoric in his list of "A Few
Dont's," originally published in the March,1913 issue of Poetry. His "Imagist Manifesto" there
prefigured the very strategies that rendered the BLAST manifestos so persuasive. In both venues,
Pound quoted himself alongside Pater and Whistler, theorists whose authority was already well
established within modernist artistic circles.
In retrospect, Pound's distinctions between "good poetry" and "bad verse" and his sweeping
interdictions against entire genres, movements, and even centuries represent his most conspicuous
attempts to legitimize his project. His pseudo-scientific approach to poetic practice, coupled with his
desire to compile an anthology that would compare works "on points of respective literary merit"
asserted his authority through misrecognition, since they both sought to inspire anxiety among readers
and encouraged them to turn to the editors for guidance in cultural matters. The distinctions Pound
drew between "good verse" and "verse that makes false reports" were rendered as functions of
"common sense," while his own system functioned as "natural" law Thus, Pound instructed readers
that, "Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural
sound, or their meaning," while "certain professors who have invested all their cultural capital . . . on
some perfectly dead period" were "naturally" suspicious of new ideas. Likewise Pound was
uncomfortable with the journals and techniques that exposed the artificiality of the signifier-signified
relationship:
As for the abuse of the stream of consciousness theories in writing, once it has been asserted
that this stream is conglomerate, a mixture of impression, or half-idea, intersections,
emergencies, etc., and once this is recognized, we return mentally enriched very probably; but
nevertheless we return to the value of arrangements, to the value of clear definitions, to the
value of design in composition. (Pound 1930, 699)
Ultimately, Pound practiced a double-movement in these manifestos; he worked to undermine his
cultural and academic opponents, and, at the same time, obscure and efface his own self-legitimation
strategies.
Ironically, the little magazine's two primary objectives (rebellion against traditional modes of
expression, and circumventing the constraints associated with traditional publishing venues)
repeatedly conflicted with a third goal, often repeated in the magazine manifestos and mastheads: to
expose the public to and inform them about artistic innovation. Privately funded, these magazines
could appear anywhere, but were limited in circulation; moreover, they were produced for a limited,
intelligent audience with interest in particular artistic schools, rather than for mass consumption.
While the editorial boards' disdain for commercial concerns like subscriptions gratified their
contributors, indifference to economic demands also ensured early collapse. Anticipated obsolescence,
however, was essential to any little magazine's credibility Manifestos traffic in a specific kind of
symbolic capital, capital dependent on the magazine's adversarial posture and its "relative distance"
from the dominant culture. If one goes commercial, Bishop observes, then one loses symbolic capital,
loses the power to consecrate, and thus actually loses "real" capital (1996, 290). The artists themselves
were well aware of their predicament. Marinetti both anticipated and embraced Futurism's
obsolescence in his first manifesto:
The oldest among us are thirty; we have thus at least ten years in which to accomplish our task.
When we are forty, let others younger and more daring men-throw us into the wastepaper
basket like useless manuscripts! . . . They will come against us from far away, from
everywhere, leaping on the cadence of their first poems, clawing the air with crooked fingers

and scenting at the academy gates the good smell of our decaying minds already promised to
the catacombs of libraries. (Chipp 1968, 288)
As early as 1921, many of the artists had achieved a significant degree of publicity, and journals like
The Little Review and the Dial tended to print the same material over and over. As Broom editor
Harold Loeb remarked, "No longer was there novelty in publishing T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, Mina
Loy or Marianne Moore" (Konritzer 1983, 27). Their success, Pound observed, had hastened their
decline: "The term 'art movement' usually refers to something immobile. It refers to a point or an
intersection or a declaration of conclusions arrived at. When the real movement or ascent has
occurred, such a declaration is made, and things remain at that point or recede" (1930, 692). Lawrence
Rainey notes that, by the late 20s and early 30s, the little magazines that had previously been
published with private support were being adopted by major universities:
individual patronage was being replaced with decentralized yet effective forms of state support;
and criticism was no longer a matter of individual appreciation but a professional practice of
"reading" conducted within the university Literary modernism, originally an unstable mix of
rebellious and conservative motif, was becoming part of "official culture." (Rainey 1989a) The
professional artist-critic had staked his claim.
Despite attacks from the popular press and mutinies from within, the magazines achieved their own
stated goals. If the modernist movement can be characterized as a program of change, a constant
struggle against the accepted belief, then the little magazine manifestos represented an ideal vehicle
for vanguard artists. The editors of these magazines were excited by the promises that the nascent
millennium held for the future; they capitalized on "nowness" and embraced their own obsolescence.
The clarions for modernist poetry, these editors advocated not the newest thing, but rather change
itself as a principle. If such a rejuvenation of "the sad and perplexed Muse" were to occur today, it
would most likely take place on computer screens. Yet Pound, Loy, and Marinetti would most likely
have rejoiced at the arrival of the "information age," for it holds the potential to obviate their most
pressing constraint: limited readership.

Footnotes
1 Many of the arguments in Rainey's article, "The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication
of The Waste Land," can be applied to the power struggles at work in little magazine publication.
Rainey asserts that Eliot broke into "commercial culture" when his poem appeared in the Dial, a mode
of production "supported by massive and unprecedented patronage which facilitated modernism's
transition from a literature of an exiguous elite to a position of prestigious dominance" (1989, 294).
2 When Others first appeared in 1915, editor Alfred Kreymborg felt that "a medium had arrived in
which the diversified contributors, not the editor, dictated the editorial policy" (1925, 242).
Contributors do not belong to a group or school, he argued in the December, 1918 issue; rather,
"collectively, they eschew everything that approximates ismism . . . . The curriculum is taboo; the
only question asked is: 'Does a man express himself, and if so, how well?"' (1918, 1)
3 Many Futurist manifestos were later reprinted and discussed in several Parisian and American little
magazines.
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