Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The Egoist, March 1915

A day late, my post on The Egoist for March: just a few quick notes for myself.

Richard Aldington writes an essay on Ernest Dowson that warms my heart because he was inspired to do so while "turning over old numbers of the Mercure de France" (41). This piece is particularly interesting because of its economic theory of art, lamenting the struggles of his contemporary young poets. I wonder if there's some oblique commentary on Pound in his account of geniuses who are unfit to make a regular living.

Marsden continues her "Truth and Reality" series, with meditations on reality as based in conventions of language. Importantly, she attacks Bergson, who was important to the magazine in 1913. This essay is really interesting, and will get more attention than I'm going to give it right now--in my dissertation.

Harold Munro, after the collapse of Poetry and Drama, has found his way to The Egoist to pen a piece on a poet who died young, James Elroy Flecker, which ends with this sentence: "Few writers have devoted such careful study to their art, and few modern poets realized so truly the necessity for devotion to the art of poetry" (39). Note how, oddly, Munro seems to say that modern poetry is already finished with the past tense of "realized." I wonder if that's a slip, or if there's an implied periodization there.

F.S. Flint contributes a few lines of translation from the Mille Nuits et Une Nuit, presumably from Antoine Galland's edition.

The Egoist prints poems in french by Paul Fort.

Three Chicago journals have taken out a full page ad at the end: Poetry, The Little Review, and Drama. The momentum of American modernism seems to be shifting from New York to Chicago in a hurry.

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