The Little Review (Vol. IV, No. 7): Modernist Vanguard, Censorship & World Verse

1. Historical Genesis: The Little Magazine That Made Modernism

In the fertile landscape of twentieth-century avant-garde literature, no single periodical exerted a more decisive or uncompromising influence than The Little Review. Established in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson (1886–1973), joined shortly thereafter by Jane Heap (1883–1964), the magazine emblazoned upon its masthead the audacious motto: “The Magazine That Is Read by Those Who Write the Others.”

In May 1917, Ezra Pound was appointed Foreign Editor based in London, transforming The Little Review into an international axis connecting Paris, London, New York, and Chicago. Pound immediately funneled the works of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and W. B. Yeats onto its pages. By November 1917 (Vol. IV, No. 7), the magazine was headquartered at 24 West 16th Street in Greenwich Village, standing at the epicenter of modernist controversy and aesthetic experimentation.

2. Curated Architecture of the November 1917 Issue

The November 1917 issue represents a remarkable cross-section of early twentieth-century international vanguard literature, spanning Oriental translation, Irish dramatic folk-satire, French symbolism, and Anglo-American Vorticism:

• Chinese Poems of Li Po (Translated by K. Sasaki & Maxwell Bodenheim): Four lyrical gems—“Whose Daughter?”, “A Woman Speaks”, “Veil-Skirt”, and “I Go to Visit a Semi-God”. Embodying the imagist principles championed by Pound, these translations eschew Victorian poetic verbosity in favor of piercing, concrete, visual metaphors where a sword plunged into leaping water mirrors love curling around the heart.
• Sketches by jh. (Jane Heap): Comprising “White” (Parts I & II) and “Void”, Heap’s prose sketches capture urban estrangement, industrial alienation, and nocturnal introspection with crystalline modernist precision.
• Lady Gregory’s “Hanrahan’s Oath”: A complete one-act Irish comedy starring the mythic hedge-poet Owen Hanrahan. Haunted by a fiery sermon on eternity and the false belief that his careless gossip led to his comrade Feeney’s penal transportation to Australia, Hanrahan takes a solemn oath of silence for a year and a day—only to be hailed as a miraculous holy hermit by naive peasants before discovering the entire rumor was an inventive fabrication by Mary Gillis.
• The Modern Art Portfolio: Demonstrating The Little Review’s role as an art journal, this issue reproduced visual plates from leading Cubist, Fauvist, and Vorticist masters, including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Max Weber, Marie Laurencin, Walt Kuhn, André Derain de Segonzac, and Jules Pascin.
• Imaginary Letters, VI by Ezra Pound: Adopting the persona of Walter Villerant writing to Mrs. Bland Burn, Pound delivers a searing critique of English puritanism, the decline of French literary arbiters following Remy de Gourmont’s death, and Henry Fielding’s earthy realism as an antidote to sentimental mysticism.
• The Raised Arms (Théâtre Muet) by Remy de Gourmont: Translated by Stéphane Boecklin, this visionary symbolic pantomime dramatizes the cosmic evolution of divine geometry—from Pentagon to Sphere to Triangle—above an ocean of praying human souls.
• Editorial Manifesto: Art and the Censors: Margaret Anderson’s legendary protest against the Post Office’s suppression of the October 1917 issue over Wyndham Lewis’s wartime story “Cantleman’s Spring Mate”, foreshadowing the epic legal battles that would culminate in the historic 1921 trial over James Joyce’s Ulysses.

3. Central Thematic Pillars

„To make silence in the roads for ever would be a better task than every Orpheus, and he playing harpstrings to the flocks!”
— Lady Gregory, Hanrahan’s Oath (1917)

The Power and Peril of the Tongue

In Lady Gregory’s Hanrahan’s Oath, the tongue is celebrated both as the poet’s supreme creative instrument and as the fatal spark of communal destruction. Hanrahan vows absolute silence in penance for his supposed gossip, discovering that in a world driven by rumour and projection, even silence is immediately misinterpreted as sainthood. The play stands as a razor-sharp commentary on how folklore, myth-making, and public opinion construct identities regardless of individual reality.

Artistic Autonomy vs. Administrative Censorship

Margaret Anderson’s editorial manifesto in this issue is one of the pivotal documents in the history of American literary freedom. When the United States Post Office confiscated the October 1917 issue under the Comstock obscenity laws for printing Wyndham Lewis’s frontline war story, Anderson refused to apologize or conciliate. She proclaimed literature to be an inviolable sovereign domain that no bureaucratic censor possessed the authority or discernment to govern.

4. Textual Curation & Typographic Integrity

In keeping with the scholarly standards of Lumen Libri, this digital edition has been meticulously restored for the modern reader:

• Elimination of Ephemeral Clutter: Transient 1917 back-matter advertisements (pianos, confectioneries, tailoring shops, and coupon forms) have been expunged, allowing the core literary texts to stand unencumbered.
• Removal of Postal Notices: Bureaucratic postal affidavits, subscription rate tables, and delivery delay notices have been cleaned to preserve narrative pacing and aesthetic continuity.
• Enhanced Structural Pagination: All eight works—from Li Po’s imagist verses to Lady Gregory’s theatrical dialogue and Pound’s epistolary prose—are formatted across balanced, responsive spreads optimized for both desktop and mobile reading.

5. Frequently Asked Questions