The Politics of Reception

Abstract

By 1939, all of the magazines addressed thus far had ceased publication, or, as in the case of Scrutiny, were locked into an editorial vision that increasingly ignored contemporary poetic production. The Second World War, of course, had much to do with this, especially with the institution of paper rationing, which began in early 1940 and continued to 1948. The result was a significant decrease in any print production and more direct government control over what could be published (Gardiner 417–18).¹ Notable exceptions included John Lehmann’s New Writing and Daylight (1942–46), printed under the Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press imprint that Lehmann ran by the 1940s, and Cyril Connolly’s Horizon (1940–49), which enjoyed the patronage of a wealthy art collector (Latham “Cyril Connolly’s” 857). Then there was Poetry (London) (1939–51). Run by Meary James Tambimuttu, whose “Letters” that opened most of the issues posed a challenge to the culturalist and political poetry of the 1930s and argued for a more expansive, and indeed “Romantic,” vision for poetry. The “Letters” singled out Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and W. H. Auden as the main representatives of the former tendency—a tendency Tambimuttu came to call “objective reporter” poetry.²