Nimbus, "A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas", was a literary magazine co-founded in London in 1951 by Martin Green [1] and Tristram Hull. [2]
Nimbus, "A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas", was a literary magazine co-founded in London in 1951 by Martin Green [1] and Tristram Hull. [2]
Nimbus, a British "little magazine" of the 1950s, was founded in 1951. [3] The magazine represents part of a rich history of literary magazines that reflect not only the literary, but also the social and political history of England. Nimbus continued as well a tradition of modernism cultivated since the First World War, especially by writers of the Bloomsbury Group and the Auden generation. Nimbus was among such important little magazines as Encounter , London Magazine , and Poetry edited by such distinguished writers as T. S. Eliot, John Lehmann and Stephen Spender, who helped set a tone of excellence in the publication of little magazines and were instrumental in changing the mood and direction of modern British literature.
Nimbus: A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas began publication in December 1951 as a quarterly magazine [3] of new writing. Tristram Hull, son of R. F. C. Hull, poet and translator of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, acted as editor for the magazine's four volumes of thirteen issues. Hull was later joined by co-editors Ivo Jarosy, 1953–1954, and David Wright, 1955–1957 [4] and Martin Green (author, 1951–1957) when the magazine was published from Martin's flat: 20 Shipley House, SW8 (Nimbus Issue No.1 Dec 1951) During this period Wright & Green published 19 poems by Patrick Kavanagh, sent to Wright by Patrick Swift, which proved to be the turning point in Kavanagh's career. [5] Due to editorial differences between Wright and Hull, Christopher Logue, in 1957, became co-editor with Hull and the name of the magazine was changed to Nimbus: New English Review.
The magazine, published by John Trafford at the Halcyon Press, grew in size, stature and reputation from a fifteen-page experiment into a sixty-page provocative venue for new British, Commonwealth and Continental writing. Nimbus editors rejected strict identification with any one contemporary British literary school, yet often found themselves involved in their debates and controversies. Nimbus attempted to distance itself from such recognized "Movement" poets as Kingsley Amis. The Movement poets were themselves reacting against the earlier romantic "New Apocalypse" writers such as George Barker, Anthony Thwaite, G. S. Fraser and Henry Treece. The Movement writers were, in turn, considered by the "Maverick" poets to be conservative, formalist and neoclassical. [6]
Nimbus was started as a quarterly magazine. [7] Later it was published irregularly and ceased publication after 13 issues [7] in 1958. [8]
Nimbus published a diverse group of writers that included Dannie Abse, W. H. Auden, George Barker, Jean Cocteau, Mircea Eliade, T. S. Eliot, Jean Genet, Michael Hastings, Anthony Thwaite, John Heath-Stubbs, C. G. Jung, Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Vernon Scannell, Laurie Lee, Bertolt Brecht, George MacBeth, Colin MacInnes, Pablo Neruda, Stevie Smith, Alexander Trocchi, Richard Wilbur and David Wright.
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944.
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.
The Penguin poetry anthologies, published by Penguin Books, have at times played the role of a "third force" in British poetry, less literary than those from Faber and Faber, and less academic than those from Oxford University Press..
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, terms intended to contrast them with larger, commercial magazines.
The Kenyon Review is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin.
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".
Anthony Simon Thwaite was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters.
Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.
David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".
— W. H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
Rolfe Arnold Scott-James (1878–1959) was a British journalist, editor and literary critic. He is often cited as one of the first people to use the word "modernism" in his 1908 book Modernism and Romance, in which he writes, "there are characteristics of modern life in general which can only be summed up, as Mr. Thomas Hardy and others have summed them up, by the word, modernism".
Martin Green was an English-born writer, editor and publisher.
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.
Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art was a magazine published in Dublin, Ireland from December 1949 to July 1951. It was founded and edited by John Ryan.
X, A Quarterly Review, often referred to as X magazine, was a British review of literature and the arts published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959 and 1962. It was co-founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright.
Contempo, A Review of Books and Personalities, was a "literary and social commentary" published by Milton A. Abernethy and Anthony Buttitta at Chapel Hill, North Carolina from 1931 to 1934. Though less well-known than some of its contemporaries, Contempo fits into the tradition of the "Little Magazine," a group of elite literary magazines pervasive in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The Montreal Group, sometimes referred to as the McGill Group or McGill Movement, was a circle of Canadian modernist writers formed in the mid-1920s at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The Group included Leon Edel, John Glassco, A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, F. R. Scott, and A. J. M. Smith, most of whom attended McGill as undergraduates. The group championed the theory and practice of modernist poetry over the Victorian-style versification, exemplified by the Confederation Poets, that predominated in Canadian poetry at the time.
Andonis George Manganaris-Decavalles January 25, 1920 – June 9, 2008, known under his pen name of Andonis Decavalles, was a Greek-American poet and professor of literature. Described by M. Byron Raizis as “the outstanding poet of the Greek diaspora in America," Decavalles published poetry, translations, and literary essays in a wide variety of American and Greek journals and was the author of 5 volumes of original poetry in Greek. A volume of his selected poems was translated into English by Kimon Friar. He authored Greek translations of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and the poetry of W. H. Auden, and he translated works of Greek writers into English, including Odysseus Elytis. In 1977 he was awarded the Academy of Athens Poetry Award for his book Armoi, Κaravia, Lytra [Greek: Αρμοί, Καράβια, Λύτρα; Joints, Ships, Ransoms], the first writer of the Greek diaspora to be so honored.