While the map depicted here on our website focuses on the importance of Ezra Pound on the different magazines of the Little Modern Magazine movement of the 20th century, the Modern Journalist Project also analyzed other figures who might have proven equally – if not more – influential than Pound himself. In this collection of data, our team was intrigued by visualizing the importance of certain authors and contributors to the movement embodied and propagated by the Little Modern Magazine in the early 20th century. In order to showcase which authors and contributors might be most notorious, our group decided to overlap the authors whose works were published in the Imagist Anthology and those published in The Little Review. The decision to cross-reference these two collections is not arbitrary. On the contrary, visually portraying this information might offer insights into the authorship and intellectual stirrings of major modernist journals that a blank reading of the text alone might not provide.
Our group chose to cross reference the Imagist Anthology, which appeared yearly from 1914-1917, with the Little Review, which ran from 1914-1922, for their perceptions as prestige journals, publishing only the most well-received modernist poems. Although the Imagist Anthology only enjoyed four short issues, it contains much of corpus deemed valuable in this a burgeoning literary movement. Editors, with their own agendas and preferences, often streamlined their literary communities, which in turn ensures that readers could expect certain flavors from different publications. By comparing, say the Imagist Anthology with the published authors of the Little Review, we would gain unique insights into the influence and reception of prominent authors of the time in literary circles. Similarly, The Little Review, while publishing only nine volumes, is considered today to be one of the most significant modern magazines of its time. So much so in fact, that it was home to James Joyce’s Ulysses first printing.
Close up of the overlapping literary nodes of authors published both in the Imagist Anthology and The Little Review.
We then overlapped the authors present in the Anthology with contributors and authors from The Little Review. This data shows us two things. First, we can gleam from it which authors were influential enough to be published not only in The Little Review, but then also reaffirmed in their importance by the editors of the Imagist Anthology, who were Ezra Pound in 1914, H.D. and Richard Aldington in 1915, and consequently edited by Amy Lowell for the remainder of its publication, until 1917. These authors, which are featured in both The Little Review and Imagist Anthology are: William Carlos Williams, F.S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, H.D., Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Hueffer, John Gould Fletcher, James Joyce, and Amy Lowell. The second thing our data can demonstrate is the literary influence of various authors. Although quantification of value is a little difficult in most instances, our data shows an interesting occurrence. Here, the size of the nodes associated to each author reflects how often authors were published in both collections. One would deduce then, that the authors with biggest nodes would reflect the ones which enjoyed the most notoriety and influence in their time. Our data shows us that Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, and Richard Aldington were the most influential of the group.
Of course, these conclusions are based solely on number of times these authors were published in editions of The Little Review or Imagist Anthology. Our data does not reflect the relative influence of authors who read their works and who used them as inspiration for their own work. It might be interesting for example, to look at how often their works were cited, or even perhaps (should this data ever become available, though it would be quite a feat) how often certain literary works were spoken of and mentioned in letters, journals, etc.