The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism Before the Great War

TLDR: The New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War as discussed by the authors, but despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, the New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics.

Abstract: It is well known that the New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War. Of the three main polemicists of early modernism— T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for the magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described the New Age in 1914 as "one of the only good papers in the country" ("Letter" 319), published some of his early stories in the paper and used its correspondence columns to lash out at his opponents, real or imagined. But despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, the New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics. Although historians of Edwardian Britain are well acquainted with the fact that the New Age played an important role in pre-war British politics, very little has actually been written about the paper. John Finlay, an historian of the Social Credit movement, maintains that historians have "neglected" the journal because its politics are "so hard to categorize" (83). Rather than attempting any categorization himself, Finlay concludes that "the paper was sui generis, a judgment which would have appealed to its editor," Alfred Orage (83). Similarly, Wallace Martin, the main literary historian of the New Age, attributes the paper's mercurial politics to its writers' independence from existing political parties and factions. Martin argues that the readership of "the first Socialist weekly in London" (The New Age 5) was comprised mainly of an "in-