The Crisis : Soldier, Colored, advancement

Considering the fact that the magazine was edited by W. B. Dubois, this magazine seems to show value of black people in USA of 1918. The articles suggested in the magazine keep emphasizing the value of black soldiers, and their ability to deal with the problems in their own tasks. For example, in a letter from General Ballou, the speaker says, “there is no longer any occasion to resent race discrimination, because there was none.”(62) The writer even says that colored office could do their work properly. Such idea of foreigners inside the army who perform well their tasks can be also found in the exemplary dialogue between Socrates and Eudices. By explaining that the foreign soldiers also should be well treated, the story seems to emphasize embracing racial others in the society. A sonnet to negro soldiers also depict the value of black people who can do their task well by saying “…shall rise and fro their blows cast down the thoron of prejudice”(64) As such, this magazine keeps suggesting examples that depict the exemplary successful figures in the black society, and try to uphold the value of black people.

The Egoist : Symbol, music, science

This magazine shows the main idea on aesthetics of Modernism and its relationship with philosophical idea or cultural stuffs like music. The first article written by D. Marsden, ‘Our Philosophy of the Real’ shows agents of human development as manual labor and symbol making. By positioning each of agents as intension of actual thing and extension of mental process, the writer says that these forces would allow people to recreate their lives. He mainly deals with symbol which depicts sensuality made from the mind. What he tries to suggest is that while traditional idealism believed that symbolic language would correspond to the reality, nowadays, it is not possible, and the symbol is used by one’s own imagination and process of the mind which cannot directly refer to reality. The article ‘Claude Debussy’ makes connection between poetry and music, and this also makes us think about the relationship between sensuality and literary language. T.S Eliot’s article, Contemporanea also suggests certain traits of modernist thought. While emphasizing the influence of French poetry, he also says that “A poet, like a scientist, is contributing toward the organic development of culture”(84). This reminds us the line from his work, ‘the tradition and the individual talent’ which says that poet should operate like catalyst, by making connection with existing traditions without transformation of original meaning of the texts.

The Little Review : Abstraction, tradition, imagery

This magazine also implies techniques of modernism. Poems of Wallace Stevens show how the modernist poem is working. Abstraction is the most salient characteristic in modernism and we can read such traits in his poem ‘anecdote of men by the thousand.’ In this poem, the writer makes connection between soul and the external world, so makes us imagine abstract image of thinking that existence of people can become a territorial place. William Carlos Williams’ prose about love explains about his complex thought on love. He does not uphold the passion in love, and recommends us to be careful to the relationship with one another by alluding many traditional litearry texts in European culture. Both the content which tries to negate one’s free emotion and the form which alludes many literary works seem to show us a characteristic of modernism. A poem, ‘Dreams in war time’ depicts vivid images of the town, so this also reminds us technique of modernism.