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:
I wonder how far you have gone today,
Chasing after dragonflies—
or Buson’s
Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,
This granted, yet—
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.”