William Carlos Williams
Although Williams contributed to other little magazines like Others and Poetry, his popularity among readers was minimal due in large part to his unclassifiable style. He experimented with Imagism, but never fully embraced one school of thought. Conformity never suited Williams’s poetry. Williams wanted to move art away from the intellects and expressed frustration at Eliot’s “The Wasteland” for its references to Greek mythology. "Kora in Hell" appears in 1920 as Williams first major work. The novel attacks Eliot's intellectual approach to poetry and places emphasis on precision of language and description. Williams's personal life hardly resembles his bold artistic declarations. Receiving his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Williams practiced medicine in Rutherford, N.J. His quiet private life adds a curious insight to his fiery call for contact with other artists. While Williams published into the 60’s (considered a big influence on the Beats), “Spring and All” represents Williams ultimate play on language merging poetry and prose.

Robert McAlmon
Contact resulted from a meeting between McAlmon and Williams at one of Lola Ridge's parties. Williams notes in his autobiography that McAlmon “was the instigator in the Contact idea” (175). Supposedly, McAlmon fully funded the project despite living on a barge in the harbor and earning wages as a nude model (Tashjian 24). Despite the magazines initial funding problems, McAlmon’s fortune altered significantly when he married Bryher, H.D.’s companion. After Bryher and McAlmon moved to London in 1921, Contact was funded by McAlmon through the help of his father-in-law Sir John Ellerman, a wealthy publisher. Within six months, McAlmon moved to Paris and lived there throughout the expatriate pilgrimage of the 1920’s. He befriend James Joyce and established Contact Editions, a publishing company interested in publishing American artists living abroad. Contact Editions released the first two novels of Hemingway, and works by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Throughout McAlmon's lifetime, he remained a little know writer. Williams describes McAlmon efforts as thus, “If there is in writing a form without form, it is that of McAlmon. What he does is not realism. It has about it a strong moral tone. It is a return of the meaning, moral, to the word….It is the word used with a conscience, and for its proper significance as a word…” (Williams et al.). Despite his influence on and importance to Williams and expatriate writers, McAlmon remains an unrecognized figure of modernism.

Compiled by Theodore Waldo Emerson(Class of '06, Davidson College)