Chapter I: Front Matter

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

APRIL, 1916

Four Poems: Carl Sandburg
Gone
Graves
Choices
Child of the Romans
Portrait of Carl Sandburg by Elizabeth Buehrmann
Dreiser Sherwood Anderson
To John Cowper Powys Arthur Davison Ficke
A Letter from London Ezra Pound
A Sorrowful Demon Alexander S. Kaun
The Poet Speaks Margaret C. Anderson
Poems: Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne
The Cry
The Excuse
The Cross
What Then—? R. G.
German Poetry William Saphier
An Isaiah Without a Christ Charles Zwaska
Announcements
Flamingo Dreams Lupo de Braila
New York Letter Allan Ross Macdougall
The Theatre
Book Discussion
The Reader Critic
Vers Libre Prize Contest

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

VOL. III

APRIL, 1916

NO. 2

Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

Four Poems

CARL SANDBURG

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
Far off
Everybody loved her.
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
On a dream she wants.
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk: a few old things
And is gone....
Gone with her little chin
Thrust ahead of her
And her soft hair blowing careless
From under a wide hat,
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
Nobody knows where she’s gone.

Graves

I dreamed one man stood against a thousand,
One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.
One year and another he walked the streets,
And a thousand shrugs and hoots
Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.

He died alone
And only the undertaker came to his funeral.

Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind,
And over the graves of the thousand, too,
The flowers grow anod in the wind.

Flowers and the wind,
Flowers anod over the graves of the dead,
Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white,
Masses of purple sagging ...
I love you and your great way of forgetting.

Choices

They offer you many things,
I a few.
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
And a fear of death
and a remembering of regrets:
All this they offer you.
I come with:
salt and bread
a terrible job of work
and tireless war;
Come and have now:
hunger
danger
and hate.

Child of the Romans

The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclairs and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work,
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.

Dreiser

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._
_Fine, or superfine._

Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in him.

When Dreiser is gone we shall write books, many of them. In the books we write there will be all of the qualities Dreiser lacks. We shall have a sense of humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More than that we shall have grace, lightness of touch, dreams of beauty bursting through the husks of life.

Oh, we who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not have. That is a part of the wonder and the beauty of Dreiser, the things that others will have because of Dreiser.

When he was editor of _The Delineator_, Dreiser went one day, with a woman friend, to visit an orphans’ asylum. The woman told me the story of that afternoon in the big, gray building with Dreiser, heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform and watching the children—the terrible children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.

“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said. That is a good picture of Dreiser. He is old and he does not know what to do with life, so he just tells about it as he sees it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he shakes his head.

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick his books to pieces, to laugh at him. Thump, thump, thump, here he comes, Dreiser, heavy and old.

The feet of Dreiser are making a path for us, the brutal heavy feet. They are tramping through the wilderness, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting “Look at me”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.

The men who follow Dreiser will have much to do. Their road is long. But because of Dreiser, we, in America, will never have to face the road through the wilderness, the road that Dreiser faced.

_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._
_Fine, or superfine._

To John Cowper Powys, on His “Confessions”

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

I.

Old salamander basking in the fire,
Winking your lean tongue at a coal or two,
Lolling amid the maelstroms of desire,
And envying the lot of none or few—
Old serpent alien to the human race,
Immune to poison, apples, and the rest,
Examining like a microbe each new face
And pawing, passionless, each novel breast—
Admirer of God and of the Devil,
Hater of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell,
Skeptic of good, more skeptic yet of evil—
Knowing the sick soul sounder than the well—
We mortals send you greeting from afar—
How very like a human being you are!

II.

Impenetrably isolate you stand,
Tickling the world with a long-jointed straw.
Lazy as Behemoth, your thoughts demand
No cosmic plan to satisfy your maw;
But as the little shining gnats buzz by
You eat the brightest and spit out the rest,
Then streak your front with ochre carefully
And dance, a Malay with a tattooed breast.
There are no sins, no virtues left for you,
No strength, no weakness, no apostasy.
You know the world, now old, was never new,
And that its wisdom is a shameless lie.
So in the dusk you sit you down to plan
Some fresh confusion for the heart of man.