• The Owl: An Introduction, by Matthew Vaughn

Published during an era when the best-remembered literary magazines were decidedly experimental and political in tone, Robert Graves’s short-lived quarterly The Owl is notable for its purposeful conservatism. As the forward to the first issue affirms, “The Owl has no politics, leads no new movement and is not even the organ of any particular generation.” In keeping with this policy, Graves rejected more radical literary figures and featured an impressive group of established writers, including Thomas Hardy, W. H. Davies, John Galsworthy, and Walter de la Mare. As a traditional miscellany, The Owl also provided a forum for artists like Pamela Bianco, whose vibrantly colored drawings are featured in each issue, and for younger writers like John Crowe Ransom, Siegfried Sassoon, and Graves himself. It offers an important counterpoint to the more ideologically driven magazines favored by Eliot and Pound. The third issue, of November 1923, appears as The Winter Owl.