The Little Review, March 1917 (Vol. 3, No. 9)

A feverish tribute to John Keats launches the piece, as the narrator pursues the moon across Box Hill, blending Keats’s own verses with a torrent of ecstatic, moon‑lit imagery. The language swells—“silver running over you,” “cold of your hot white flame”—creating a dreamlike dialogue that balances soaring reverie with Keats’s fragile return to his candlelit desk. That blend of lyrical obsession and grounded observation sets the tone for a meditation on artistic yearning that feels both timeless and startlingly modern.

The essay that follows turns a razor‑sharp eye on critics who idolize figures like Sarah Bernhardt and Mary Garden, reducing their “personality” to tidy, marketable traits. It probes why society both reveres and distrusts the mysterious “magic” behind great art, suggesting true genius hovers on the edge of madness and solitary insight. Through analogies to sea, flowers, and the relentless march of fate, the writer challenges listeners to contemplate the uneasy dance between individual creativity and the collective world that worships and confines it.