The Little Review, April 1917 (vol. 3, No. 10)

This is the literary magazine that would go on to publish James Joyce's Ulysses in serial form, and this April 1917 issue captures the modernist movement at its most combative and exhilarating. The magazine functions as a battlefield where writers and critics duke out the future of literature: essays champion Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with extensive quotations that demonstrate his revolutionary style, while the Vers Libre contest announces winners H. D. and Maxwell Bodenheim alongside entries from Aldington, O'Brien, and others fighting for free verse against conventional prosody. Margaret C. Anderson fires a polemic against Isadora Duncan's "pseudo-art," and the letters section crackles with readers debating recent performances and the boundaries of acceptable experimentation. The big announcement: Ezra Pound will serve as Foreign Editor, with regular contributions from T. S. Eliot and access to Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Reading this issue means witnessing the exact moment when a group of radical artists decided what modern literature would become, fighting tooth and nail against the Victorian sensibilities that still dominated the culture. For anyone curious about where modern fiction and poetry came from, this is a time capsule opened at the source.