Little Magazine
Quick answer: A little magazine is a small, non-commercial literary journal devoted to new and experimental writing. Learn the history and role of little magazines.
A little magazine is a small-circulation, non-commercial literary journal that exists to publish new, often experimental writing rather than to make money. The little refers to audience and budget, not ambition. These magazines, frequently run by one or two editors on borrowed time, have historically been where poetry's risks get taken first, printing work that commercial publishers would not touch until it was fashionable.
The term carries a specific historical weight. Scholars use it especially for the independent journals of the modernist era, roughly 1910 to 1940, but the species is alive and well: today's tiny print journals and passion-project online magazines are little magazines in everything but typeface. If you write strange or uncommercial poems, these are your natural first readers.
A Short History
Modernism was practically incubated in little magazines. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, published early work by Ezra Pound, H.D. and T. S. Eliot. The Little Review famously serialised Joyce's Ulysses and faced prosecution for it. The Dial, Blast and transition each lasted only a handful of years, which is typical; little magazines burn bright and briefly, and their short lives are a feature of the form, not a failure.
The pattern repeated through the century, from the mimeographed journals of the 1960s to the photocopied and web-based journals that followed. Each generation's difficult poets found their first audiences in the same way.
Little Magazine vs Literary Magazine
Every little magazine is a literary magazine, but not the reverse. The distinguishing marks are small circulation, minimal or no funding, editorial independence, and an appetite for the untested. A university-funded quarterly with a staff and subscribers is a literary magazine; a stapled journal run from a kitchen table with a print run of 150 is a little magazine. In practice the boundary is fuzzy, and the term is now used as much for its historical flavour as for precise classification.
Why They Matter to You
Little magazines take chances. A poem too odd for a flagship quarterly may be exactly what a three-issue-old journal is hungry for, and editors of tiny magazines often write the warmest, most personal responses in publishing. They are also communities in miniature: contribute to one and you tend to gain readers, correspondents and invitations.
Their fragility is real, so support the ones you love with subscriptions or purchases. A little magazine that folds takes its archive, and sometimes your publication record, with it, which is a good argument for keeping your own copies of everything.
What poets can take from this
- Seek out young and tiny journals for your most experimental work; they exist to take risks.
- Buy or subscribe when you submit, since little magazines survive on exactly that.
- Save PDFs or physical copies of every appearance, because small journals can vanish.
- Treat editors' personal notes as gold; they are rare and they mean something.
- Consider starting one; a laptop and stubbornness are the historic entry requirements.
Try it yourself
Write the poem you have been afraid to send anywhere because it seems too strange, then identify three small journals whose taste suggests they might welcome it.
Questions
What is a little magazine in literature?
It is a small-circulation, non-commercial journal devoted to new and often experimental writing. The term is closely associated with the modernist journals of the early twentieth century that first published writers like Eliot, Pound and Joyce.
Are little magazines still published today?
Yes, in both print and online forms. Any independent, low-budget journal run for love rather than profit continues the tradition, even if editors now say indie lit mag instead of little magazine.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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