I.

I wished a place where the current prose writings of James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and myself might appear regularly, promptly, and together, rather than irregularly, sporadically, and after useless delays.

My connection with _The Little Review_ does not imply a severance of my relations with _Poetry_ for which I still remain Foreign Correspondent, and in which my poems will continue to appear until its guarantors revolt.

I would say, however, in justification both of _Poetry_ and myself, that _Poetry_ has never been “the instrument” of my “radicalism”. I respect Miss Monroe for all that she has done for the support of American poetry, but in the conduct of her magazine my voice and vote have always been the vote and voice of a minority.

I recognize that she, being “on the ground”, may be much better fitted to understand the exigencies of magazine publishing in America, but _Poetry_ has done numerous things to which I could never have given my personal sanction, and which could not have occurred in any magazine which had constituted itself my “instrument”. _Poetry_ has shown an unflagging courtesy to a lot of old fools and fogies whom I should have told to go to hell tout pleinement and bonnement. It has refrained from attacking a number of public nuisances; from implying that the personal charm of the late Mr. Gilder need not have been, of necessity, the sign manifest of a tremendous intellect; from heaping upon the high-school critics of America the contempt which they deserve.

There would have been a little of this contempt to spare for that elder generation of American magazines, founded by mediocrities with good intentions, continued by mediocrities without any intentions, and now “flourishing” under the command and empery of the relicts, private-secretaries and ex-typists of the second regime.

Had _Poetry_ been in any sense my “instrument” I should years ago have pointed out certain defects of the elder American writers. Had _Poetry_ been my instrument I should never have permitted the deletion of certain fine English words from poems where they rang well and soundly. Neither would I have felt it necessary tacitly to comply with the superstition that the Christian Religion is indispensable, or that it has always existed, or that its existence is ubiquitous, or irrevocable and eternal.

I don’t mind the Christian Religion, but I can not blind myself to the fact that Confucius was extremely intelligent. Organized religions have nearly always done more harm than good, and they have always constituted a danger. At any rate, respect to one or another of them has nothing to do with good letters. If any human activity is sacred it is the formulation of thought in clear speech for the use of humanity; any falsification or evasion is evil. The codes of propriety are all local, parochial, transient; a consideration of them, other than as subject matter, has no place in the arts.

I can say these things quite distinctly and without in the least detracting from my praise of the spirited manner in which Miss Monroe has conducted her paper. She is faced with the practical problem of circulating a magazine in a certain peculiar milieu, which thing being so I have nothing but praise for the way she has done it. But that magazine does not express my convictions. Attacks on it, grounded in such belief, and undertaken in the magnanimous hope of depriving me of part of my sustenance, can not be expected to have more than a temporary success and that among ill-informed people.

_Blast_, founded chiefly in the interest of the visual arts, is of necessity suspended. With Gaudier-Brzeska dead on the field of battle, with Mr. William Roberts, Mr. Wadsworth, Mr. Etchells, and Mr. Wyndham Lewis all occupied in various branches of the service, there is no new vorticist painting to write about. Such manuscript as Mr. Lewis has left with me, and such things as he is able to write in the brief leisure allowed an artillery officer, will appear in these pages.

It is quite impossible that _Blast_ should again appear until Mr. Lewis is free to give his full energy to it.

In so far as it is possible, I should like _The Little Review_ to aid and abet _The Egoist_ in its work. I do not think it can be too often pointed out that during the last four years _The Egoist_ has published serially, in the face of no inconsiderable difficulties, the only translation of Remy de Gourmont’s _Chevaux de Diomedes_; the best translation of Le Comte de Gabalis, Mr. Joyce’s masterpiece _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, and is now publishing Mr. Lewis’s novel _Tarr_. Even if they had published nothing else there would be no other current periodical which could challenge this record, but _The Egoist_ has not stopped there; they have in a most spirited manner carried out the publication in book form of the _Portrait of the Artist_, and are in the act of publishing Mr. Eliot’s poems, under the title _Mr. Prufrock and Observations_.

I see no reason for concealing my belief that the two novels, by Joyce and Lewis, and Mr. Eliot’s poems are not only the most important contributions to English literature of the past three years, but that they are practically the only works of the time in which the creative element is present, which in any way show invention, or a progress beyond precedent work. The mass of our contemporaries, to say nothing of our debilitated elders, have gone on repeating themselves and each other.