Editorials

Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago

Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts Building—an event which has already filled us with the keenest anticipations. There will be three on the war:—Woman and War, War and Christianity, and The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War. There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against the tyranny of the past:—an introductory one on the significance of art in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian, German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets, Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at the office of The Little Review; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue. How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly “safe” subjects making its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of terror.

The Philistinization of College Students

A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if The Little Review will not succeed in creating a Drang und Sturm epoch; if it will not “stir the hearts of college men and women—those who have not yet been completely philistinized by their ‘vocational guides’; college men and women who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals.” It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to The Little Review; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are so close to the Drang und Sturm ourselves that perhaps we cannot see clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes The Little Review our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally, we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip by.

Witter Bynner on the Imagists

In sending us Apollo Sings, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more fun, for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a little Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the Japanese and try to found a school. He goes on: “In spite of several lovely attempts, Pound’s chiefly, the rest seeming to me negligible, they’ve not approached the poetess Chiyo’s lines to her dead child:

or Buson’s

I’m ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in English these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would acknowledge the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward with a French name and curious pedantries! Isn’t the old name for this sort of poem Haikai or something of that sort? At any rate, there is a name. I ought to know it. And so ought they.”

A Rebel Anthology

William D. Haywood, veteran of many labor battles and foremost exponent of the militant unionism in America, is adding to his manifold activities that of compiler and editor. He purposes the formation of an anthology of poems by social rebels, principally of those who have been connected with the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the book will be included poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Covington Hall, Francis Buzzell, George Franklin, Charles Ashleigh, and others. Mr. Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art which is manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He maintains that the heightened consciousness of the workers is beginning to express itself through an adequate and distinctive poetical medium.