In a contemporaneous review of Maurice O’Sullivan's Twenty Years A-Growing (1933), Osbert Burdett argues that the modern educational system has ‘so blunted [the established author’s] natural appetite for letters that he has degenerated into an addict of mere words, of that daily craving for print which multiplies stupidity by destroying the critical faculty of its victims’. Burdett places the press first in a list of fashionable urban developments to be avoided by his readers: ‘Regard daily papers, broadcasting, the cinema, cocktail-parties as corruptions that may easily become bad habits’. Comparing O’Sullivan to the unschooled W. H. Davies, Burdett opposes the latter's apparently quaint simplicity to this addictive print culture: ‘His poetry is his own; his idiom is not the lingo of Fleet Street.’ As such, Burdett repeats a common but flawed representation of Davies's relationship with the press.

Nevertheless, Burdett echoes sentiments expressed by Davies himself in the periodical medium. In an unorthodox contribution to Teacher's World (June 1923), Davies pits his unschooled individualism against an educational system where children are ‘herded together like cattle’, such that they learn to ‘work […] like cold machines’. According to Davies, the only advantage established poets have over him is financial: ‘[Education] gives a man six words to my one; and a man is paid by his number of words without a question of their value or necessity’. As such, he associates his more educated contemporaries with journalistic hack- work, and distances himself from their commercialism.

If dissociated from the Fleet Street journalists by reputation, Davies was nonetheless as embedded in periodical culture as his contemporaries. Sylvia Harlow's bibliography of Davies's work itemises almost three hundred original periodical contributions, significantly more when reprints are included. Michael Cullup concedes that ‘the sheer quantity of poems [he published] begins to look like production to order’. Clearly, Davies was not so far removed from the economics of publishing as he implied and his reviewers imagined.

This chapter reassesses Davies's relationship with the press by analysing a representative cross-section of his periodical oeuvre. The image of the writer that emerges complicates Burdett's depiction of Davies's detachment from modern print culture.