The Little Review, July 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 3) by Margaret C. Anderson
"The Little Review, July 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 3) by Margaret C. Anderson" is a modernist arts magazine issue compiled in the early 20th century. It showcases avant-garde poetry, fiction, and polemic, with editorial notices and reader correspondence framing a spirited debate about art, society, and the war. The likely topic is a bold presentation of experimental literature and cultural criticism that rejects conventional taste. The issue opens with Wyndham Lewis’s Imaginary
Letters, a spiky “Code of a Herdsman” that exalts individuality over the “herd,” urging multiple selves, a personal vocabulary, and ruthless honesty. T. S. Eliot contributes four poems—satirizing reactionary journalism, skipping through cosmopolitan personae, setting a squalid honeymoon against Byzantine splendor, and skewering ecclesiastical complacency in “The Hippopotamus.” Ezra Pound’s “Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden” stages a 15th‑century bathhouse dialogue on cleanliness, Christianity, Spartan customs, beauty, and the dangers of dogma. John Rodker’s “Three Nightpieces” render panic, marital dread, and nightmare in clipped, hallucinatory scenes. Louis Gilmore’s “Improvisations” offer imagist miniatures on the mind and the seasons; Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Poet’s Heart” is a symbolic drama of seekers (a shepherd, peddler, nun, and wine‑jar maiden) who are gathered by a Poet into his inner garden; and Emanuel Morgan’s “Opus 96” is a brief hymn to perpetual beauty. “The Reader Critic” section bristles with attacks and defenses—on taste, modernism, and the war—quoting Barbusse on the horror of combat, noting the Goldman‑Berkman prosecutions, and asserting the magazine’s uncompromising stance, while announcements trail forthcoming work by Yeats and Joyce alongside the usual advertisements and subscription appeals. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Chicago, New York: Margaret C. Anderson, 1914-1922.
Credits
Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.
