Oxford Archaeology (OA) and Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) undertook adjacent excavations on former agricultural land on the southern outskirts of Banbury in advance of separate housing developments. The MOLA site, known as East of Bloxham Road, was excavated between November 2014 and March 2015 and comprised a sub-rectangular arable field within the interstice formed by the junction of Bloxham Road and Salt Way, a historic route now used as a bridleway. The OA investigations were undertaken at Wykham Park Farm between November 2019 and May 2020 and encompassed six excavation areas situated across six fields to the south and east, as well as the footprint of a drainage outfall that extended to the south (Fig. 1).

Oxford Archaeology (OA) undertook an archaeological excavation in advance of construction of an industrial unit at Polar Technology’s headquarters at Oasis Business Park, Eynsham (NGR SP 42761 08768; Fig. 1). The site lay 1 km north-west of a northern loop in the River Thames by means of which the river circumvents the limestone outcrop of Wytham Hill before turning south to pass through Oxford. The northern boundary was marked by the Chil Brook, one of a number of minor watercourses that drain this flat agricultural landscape and flow eastward into the Thames, the confluence in this instance lying a short distance downstream of Eynsham Lock. Prior to excavation the site consisted of agricultural land, the northern part of which was crossed by a former railway line that had been tarmacked and used as a car park. The site was situated at c.66 m above Ordnance Datum on the Summertown-Radley gravel terrace of the Thames, a short distance off the alluviated part of the floodplain, which lies at c.60 m above OD.

The development area was situated partly within a scheduled monument, described in the listing as a ‘large and important concentration of cropmarks, mostly comprising Bronze Age ring ditches and barrows, and Iron Age/Roman enclosures and settlement sites’.

This chapter explores the contribution made to American modernism by the “little magazine” format in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century. It focuses upon three key examples: The Little Review (1914–29), edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; Broom (1921–4), founded by Harold Loeb; and Partisan Review (1934–2003), first edited by Wallace Phillips and Philip Rahv. The chapter explores the transnational connections articulated by each magazine, demonstrating in particular how questions of the relationship between the avant-garde and politics dominated their contributions to American modernism.

This chapter starts by posing a simple and seemingly rather foolish question: why are there so few regional examples of modernist ‘little magazines’ in Britain and Ireland? The foolishness of the question might be because we all know that modernism was an international or transnational phenomenon, a matter of metropolitan perceptions and urban innovation. In other words, it happens in Bloomsbury and not Birmingham, since ‘Art is a matter of capitals’, and ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, to quote two slogans of Ezra Pound. Hence, it is not surprising to discover that the vast majority of the ‘little magazines’ that from the 1880s onwards published modern work in Britain were located primarily in London: The Yellow Book of Aubrey Beardsley and co., the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis's Blast, the mix of feminism and modernism found in The Egoist, or the critical classicism of T. S. Eliot's The Criterion – these, and many others, were clearly located in the metropolis and embedded within a cultural infrastructure of bookshops, cafes, clubs, dining rooms, or discussion circles in central London.

This perception seems, initially, to be confirmed by the contents of volume I of The Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: of more than eighty magazines analysed in a volume devoted to Britain and Ireland, only around a quarter were not published in London. In the case of strictly English magazines the dominance of London up to 1939 is even more evident. By the 1930s some ‘little magazines’ were published in the university cities of Cambridge and Oxford, often linked to undergraduate coteries (such as Cambridge Left, Experiment, and Venture in Cambridge; Bolero and Farrago in Oxford) and from the 1940s onwards we find more instances of regional publications in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The centrality of London as a place of publication for poetry magazines is also confirmed in the ‘Geographical Index’ of British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’, compiled by David Miller and Richard Price, in which for the period 1914–39 only six magazines in total are listed for the major regional conurbations of Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester.

The acclaimed critic and biographer Richard Ellmann once suggested that ‘Literary movements pass their infancy in inarticulate disaffection, but mature when they achieve a vocabulary’. One might add that another marker of successful adulthood for twentieth-century literary movements was the dissemination of this vocabulary in the pages of one or more magazines. The previous chapter examined the pressures that impelled the Imagist movement into being, considering the necessity for modernist poets to group together in order to publicly voice their disaffection. This chapter considers further how Pound and Lowell utilized strategies of advertisement and publicity for Imagism, distributing Imagist ideas as widely as possible across the field of literary publication. Particularly significant was the use of the many modernist little magazines in the period, a fact demonstrated by the publication of Pound's Des Imagistes collection in a magazine (The Glebe) prior to book publication. Returning Imagist poetry to the periodical presses where it was often first published, first reviewed, and first criticized, presents a more complex picture of how the verse emerged than when we read the poems in later anthologies, like those of Peter Jones, William Pratt or Bob Blaisdell, or in the collected poems of the individual authors. We also read and interpret an Imagist poem quite differently when we encounter it in the pages of a magazine like The Egoist, where it jostles for space alongside a serialized novel by Joyce, an editorial on women's rights, or a philosophical consideration of contemporary anarchism. As Peter McDonald argues, asking ‘where and how texts were first published… is a way into a much larger series of questions which challenge our understanding of how texts relate to their many, shifting contexts’.

Almost all of the key Imagists wrote, funded or were involved editorially with modernist magazines. In Britain H.D. and Richard Aldington were assistant editors on The Egoist; Flint wrote and reviewed widely for The New Age, Poetry and Drama, and The Poetry Review, while Pound wrote for just about every key magazine in the period but with a prominent voice in the American magazines, Poetry and The Little Review. At various times Fletcher and Lowell were financial supporters for magazines, and Pound in particular understood the importance of having a periodical in which new modernist ideas could be advertised.

Some overlook the fact that the most renowned Imagist poem, Pound's ‘In a Station of the Metro’, is actually a poem about a characteristically urban and modern experience, the mundane fact of travel by underground railway: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough’. One of the dominant ways to read the poem has been influenced by Hugh Kenner's brilliant analysis in The Pound Era (1971), where the Paris Metro of the title gives way to a symbolic underworld: ‘this is not any crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen underground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Koré saw crowds in Hades’. Locating Pound's poem within this literary geography, how- ever, loses as much as it gains, since although it allows us to trace another lineage for the classical influences in Pound's verse, or indeed in modernism more generally, it takes the poem away from the material spaces of the modernist city. Pound's poem is about making sense of a particular urban experience, the individual lost but finding beauty amidst the mass of a crowded Metro station. To understand it fully, I would argue, requires us to understand how the early twentieth-century environment found in cities such as London and Paris was registered in the formal structures and styles of Imagist poetry. Pound's Metro hokku, an adaptation of an ancient Japanese form, seemed to match the experience of glimpses of faces caught in the new urban spaces of modernism. Since ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is the most well-discussed of such Imagist poems of the city, this chapter shifts the focus to some of the other poems that treat the urban experience. In particular this chapter examines images of the urban experience by Flint and Fletcher and also Lowell's application of ‘polyphonic prose’ to the representation of the city.

Interestingly, some other Imagist poems in addition to Pound's ‘Metro’ took urban transport as their setting. Aldington published ‘In the Tube’ in The Egoist in 1915, two poems by Flint, ‘Tube’ and ‘Accident’ are set on trains, and Fletcher published a long poem about commuting across the city, ‘London Excursion’, in the 1915 anthology.

The symbiotic relationship between the Imagist movement and the many little magazines that emerged in modernism is evident in the prose publications written to announce the work of the group. To the key articles, ‘Imagisme’ and ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’, published in Poetry (Chicago) in March 1913, can be added many of the critical articles from The Egoist, the prefaces from Some Imagist Poets, and other texts by Amy Lowell, T. E. Hulme, and May Sinclair. The multiple prose discussions of Imagism are worth considering for a number of reasons: first, following the tenor of the argument in the previous two chapters, to understand how such texts functioned as part of the advertising and publicity strategies of the Imagist movement; second, to consider how these forms of Imagist theory related to Imagist practice, and whether a failure to follow Imagist ‘rules’ in the poems made any difference whatsoever.

The two texts published in Poetry, ‘Imagisme’ and ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’, can be considered the nearest document to a manifesto of Imagism. They announced Imagism to a reading public, and Pound was fond of referring to them in later critical writings. Interestingly, ‘A Few Don'ts’ was intended to accompany rejection slips sent out by Poetry, indicating the close link between the discourse of magazine publication and the Imagists. It also suggests that the document was not directly a manifesto, or at least was a text that could be adapted for different purposes. Imagism's ambiguous use of the manifesto format seems to place it as a cultural formation somewhere between the Georgian poets and the Futurist group. The first Georgian anthology contained a prefatory note, written by Edward Marsh, which modestly claimed the volume was issued ‘in the belief that English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty’. No sense of a collective entity called the Georgians is in evidence, with the name being referred to merely as ‘another “Georgian period” which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past’. The Futurists, however, had trumpeted their arrival in a number of manifestos, from 1909 onwards, including manifestos for sculpture, music, and 1913's ‘Futurist Manifesto of Lust’.

A fuller understanding of Imagism as a cultural formation requires attention to how the individual identities of the poets were formed and altered in the group identity of ‘Imagism’. The two female Imagists, Amy Lowell and H.D., were distinct from the other poets, in terms not only of their gender, but also that of their sexuality. Though H.D. married Aldington in 1913, she had already experienced an intense attachment to a female teacher, Frances Gregg, while still living in America. In 1918 H.D. met Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who was to become her lifelong companion, although H.D. also had later relation- ships with men. Amy Lowell first met the actress Ada Russell in 1912 and in 1914 Russell moved into Lowell's home at Sevenels, near Boston, remaining with her until Lowell's early death in 1925. The work of both women is marked by these various attachments and sexualities, with H.D.'s poems often exploring boundaries and borders, and much of Lowell's poetry exhibiting coded, and not so coded, forms of lesbian desire.

It is only relatively recently that these issues of gender and sexuality have been seen to significantly alter our understanding of Imagism as a movement. Reading gender and sexuality into the Imagist formation also sheds new light on the internal dispute between Pound and Lowell. Pound's dislike of Lowell's version of Imagism (what he termed ‘Amygism’) cannot there- fore be merely viewed as an aesthetic disagreement. For example, Pound's criticism of Lowell, is deeply gendered in its terminology: ‘Amygism’, Pound wrote, displayed ‘sloppiness, lack of cohesion, lack of organic centre in individual poems, rhetoric’; H.D.'s verse, he suggested in 1917, also suffered from a lack of solidity due to the ‘flow-contamination of Amy and Fletcher’. Many aspects of Imagist theory, with its vocabulary of ‘concrète things’, ‘objectivité and ‘precision’, is thus implicitly gendered, associating poetry with a masculine perception of the craft of verse. However, if Pound viewed Lowell's version of Imagism as lacking these qualities, it cannot simply be attributed to his misogyny or homophobia, evident as these are in many places in his work. For one must remember that the ‘hard light, clear edges’ of Imagism was first used by Pound to describe the work of H.D. As Cyrena Pondrom has argued, the early poems of H.D. were the ‘models’ which ‘enabled the precepts of imagism to be defined’.

Imagism has often been regarded by literary history as one of the founding moments of modern poetry, as a significant presence within Anglo-American modernism, and as an important influence upon the development of experimental and avant-garde poetry in English throughout the twentieth Century. Looking back from the 1950s T. S. Eliot, for example, wrote that ‘the starting point of modern poetry is the group denominated “imagists” in London about 1910’. Eliot's judge- ment was upheld in one of the first and most influential accounts of modern poetry after the Second World War, C. K. Stead's The New Poetic (1964); their status was then confirmed in the enduring anthology of the poets, Imagist Poetry, edited by Peter Jones and published by Penguin in 1972. This collection is still in print over thirty years later and is probably the first encounter with Imagism for many readers.

But who were the Imagist poets and why is it still worth reading them today, in the twenty-first century? Should they not be considered merely a footnote in literary history, or perhaps a minor chapter in any study of literary modernism in the early years of the twentieth century? This book suggests that it is still of interest to read the Imagist poets, and to evaluate their role within a wider narrative of British and American modernism. Their impact, therefore, deserves something more than cursory notes or summary chapters.

The Imagists consisted of a central core of Richard Aldington, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. Other writers published in the anthologies included D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Ford Madox Ford. There were five anthologies of Imagist poetry, in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and a retrospective one in 1930. Imagism helped launch the careers, in particular, of Pound, H.D. and Amy Lowell, and provided a set of statements for the reform of poetic language that influenced many other modernist writers, and later poets.

Conventionally Ezra Pound has been viewed as the central figure behind the theory and practice of Imagist poetry. Pound, critics have suggested, ‘invented’ Imagism in order to further his career, and that of others, in a cultural environment where many other artistic ‘isms’ such as Cubism, Futurism or Impressionism jostled for space and public attention.