46 
DADA 
«HT HE trouble is the Little Review never knows when to stop. Just now 
I it is headed straight for Dada; but we could forgive even that if it 
would drop Else von Freytag-Loringhoven on the way.”—From an 
article by Harriet Monroe in Poetry. 
Any one may say anything he pleases as long as he is willing to stand by what 
he says. 
I don’t think Harriet Monroe knew when to stop. But then we’re 
different: we don’t feel that we have ever suggested we were going to stop, not 
even at or in jail. 
Harriet Monroe in a lyrical article in Poetry: “Renewal of Youth”: 
“Therefore let youth be free and strong, let it have room for its race and its 
shout, lest bars and shackles enslave the next age” . . . And then “bars” 
for Dada, “bars” for Else von Freytag—two sets of bars for the same thing! 
Miss Monroe should watch the poetic situation a little more carefully. The 
Baroness is the first American dada. We published her with joy in June, 1918. 
Dada wasn’t so very old in Europe at that time. 
The german dadaists are closer to madness than the french. The french 
still have expiations to make. The baroness does not belong to the german 
dadaists. She fails whenever she trips over her german skeleton and falls into a 
Goethe-Nietzsche wrestling with God. When she is dada she is the only one 
living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada. 
However we do intend to drop the baroness—right into the middle of the 
history of American poetry! 
Is Miss Monroe against dada because dada laughs, jeers, grimaces, gibbers, 
denounces, explodes, introduces ridicule into a too churchly game? Dada has 
flung its crazy bridges to a new consciousness. They are quite strong enough to 
hold the few in this generation who will pass over. Dada is making a 
contribution to nonsense.—jh. 
EXPOSE 
% 
T HERE is a heavy growth of mushroom art magazines all over the place. 
Harvard seems to be the best spore producer. There has come into 
existence a purely American article of manufacture: the harvard-artist. 
If a man is in any way dissatisfied with Harvard, if he revolts at any of the 
Harvard factory regulations, at the immediate modes of dress, haircut, or dance, 
all he has to do is to buy a tweed hat and leap into one of the arts—or better still, 
start an art magazine for the “Youngest or the Pappiest.” They are artists: 
glands notwithstanding. Poetry always extends them a welcome and a word of 
encouragement.