Allen Upward opens the issue with a short story about a runaway slave who becomes a human sacrifice--very Golden Bough, Waste Land. Eliot didn't pretend that WL emerged from a vacuum (au contraire), but I haven't seen anything connecting him with Upward yet.
More generally significant, the editors present a detailed account of their decision to change the name of the journal. Upward, Pound, Aldington, Huntley Carter, and Reginald Kauffman sent a letter asking them to change the name of the journal because the journal name of The New Freewoman "causes it to be confounded with organs devoted solely to the advocacy of an unimportant reform to an obsolete political institution." The magazine's individualism positions it against democracy and against feminism. Marsden and Shaw (presumably, though they usually write these editorials in the plural) respond by agreeing. I'll quote the relevant chunk:
"In adopting the neutral title THE EGOIST and thereby obliterating the 'woman' character from the journal, we do not feel that we are abandoning anything there would be wisdom in retaining. The emphasis laid on women and their ways and works was, as was pointed out in the early days of the first FREEWOMAN, more in the nature of retort than of argument. "Feminism" was the natural reply to "Hominism," and the intent of both these was more to tighten the strings of the controversy than to reveal anything vital in the minds of the controversialists. What women could, should, might, would do if they were allowed was the retort to those who said that such things they could, should, might, would not do and therefore should not be allowed."
They follow this up with an odd philosophical statement: people are not confined to their bodies, but neither are they infinite. The metaphorical language could be from one of John Gould Fletcher's Irradiations, published in Poetry's December issue:
"With a million tentacles they invade the world of
appearance; pierce, scour, scan, scoop up as with a mighty arm the panorama of
the world: but they return an army laden with spoil always to their own. They
have lost nothing of their individualised uniqueness in their excursions.
They have scooped impressions from that with which they have had contact all
they were capable of assimilating: but they have in no way merged their
identity in what they have fed on: rather they have intensified it: made the distinctness from all that was not of itself more definite."
The reason this is important to point out: the Eastern philosophy that encourages humans to try to return to the One is completely and specifically rejected.
Check out the article itself, though: that's just a very quick summary.
Perhaps appropriately, they follow that with a selection from Herni Bergson's Creative Evolution. It's a difficult text, perhaps because it is an excerpt, but my quick inadequate summary: he looks back to Zeno's paradoxes in order to critique traditional western logic. While we are accustomed to think of states of being (like adulthood) as identifiable, actually they are ongoing processes. By thinking of processes instead of states, we come closer to reality (though farther from intuitive logic).
A columnist identified only as "R. S." contributes a skewering of the British Academy, huzzah. I'm getting sick of meanspirited satire, though this one actually did make me laugh.
Pound reviews Heuffer, mostly positively, singling out his rhythms for special praise.
Huntley Carter, despite shared billing on the letter to change the title, lashes out against Pound and Imagism (though they remain unnamed) in an article titled "My Hypothesis." I'm curious whether Pound went after Carter somewhere--I'll look around the MJP to see, because this feels more like vigorous self defense than an attack.
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