“The Blue Review” was a monthly magazine with a short run from May to July of 1913. A follow-up to the quarterly “Rhythm”, “The Blue Review” provided an additional outlet for the publication of visual arts, literary works, and academic essays. Though generally dense with semantic contributions, sparse works of visual art, as well as critical pieces, with thematic significance add to both the aesthetic and literary value of “The Blue Review”. This unification of poetry, fiction, visual elements, and analytic works is such that when combined, the effect is harmonious. Rather than detract from the individual quality of one piece, these works compounded make the overall exponentially better.
Although there aren't many poems in "The Blue Review", the majority of the poems that are included tend to have very similar concepts of love and nature. Most of the poems use nature as a way to express the authors ideas about being in love as well as the effects that aging and getting older has on a person's feelings of love. The poem "Loves Youth" by William H. Davies, written in 1913 (Vol 1. No.3, pg 151), is an example of the use of nature to portray the authors feelings about getting older and still being able to love. He says, "Not only is my love a flower/ that blooms in broad daylight/ But, like the evening Primrose, it/ Will bloom again at night". He uses nature as a metaphor to show that he acknowledges the fact that he is getting older, however, he isn't mournful about it because his love is still young and fresh. James Elroy Flecker uses this same technique in his poem, "Yasmin A Ghazel", written in 1913 (Vol 1. No. 2). His poem describes the romantic connection he has with nature. He talks about waking up in the morning and seeing the suns rays shine down on the lilies and the roses and being able to have the person you love laying next to you. I think these two poems exemplify the way the poets that are included in "The Blue Review" use nature to portray their ideas of love.
It seems that the same themes of poetic reverence for nature, and all things natural, resonate in the artwork of “The Blue Review”. And yet, it is though there is a subtlety to these pieces that keep them from feeling hackneyed; a quality that makes for relevance. “Painting”, by Ambrose McEvoy might very well be called “Portrait” if we were to only consider the foreground. The white of the subject’s dress catches our attention, but it is the background that holds it as we consider her muddled reflection--- All at once the whole painting is transformed by her hidden sadness, and we look back through the mirror at a woman and painting made suddenly beautiful. This notion of complex duality can be found in the use of shadows in G.S. Lightfoot’s “A Composition”. Again, a young woman serves as the subject. But unlike “Painting”, this piece has a voyeuristic feel to it--- As though we are observing something we are not supposed to see. If we consider the shadow in the background, this eerie sketch becomes all the more haunting as it appears this woman is in some sort of spotlight, in addition to being scrutinized by us, the audience who exists in reality. Perhaps the questions these works raise are indicative of a growth and maturation; an understanding that nature encompasses more than what we can observe.
Understandably, the essays published by "The Blue Review" are markedly different than the artistic pieces within a given issue. The distinction between them is not simply one of theme, however, but one of scope as well. Whereas the poems, stories, and visual artistic pieces tend to focus on a single idea, such as man's relationship to nature, distilling it into an impression or image, the academic contributions offer broader, theoretical criticism of the arts. Though the contributions to this category are diverse, there is a discernible current of thought running throughout. Specifically, the question of nation and its connection to artistic output recurs frequently. Perhaps counterintuitively, given their publication by a single magazine, these articles do not hold a unified position on the argument of how much British artists should submit to influence from other country's artistic trends. Rather, there is a clear schism between, on the one hand, critics who believe that British art suffers when it borrows from foreign sources and, on the other, critics who insist that there is value in being open to such influence. "Georgian Music" by W. Denis Browne represents one essay that takes the former position. In it Browne expresses disdain for composers who are "content to borrow the latest thing... from abroad and fit it onto English ideas that have no relationship to it" (65). He is encouraged, though, by the emergence of a new style which he sees as both modern and thoroughly native. Conversely, in "Conventions: Chinese, English and French", the author Gilbert Cannan posits that British theater can be improved by foreign influence, though he does recognize that recent attempts have been, thus far, unsuccessful. Nevertheless he claims that, "we have, after all, something to learn from the Chinese" (45). It is then in the juxtaposition of these seemingly irreconcilable essays that some overall motive may be understood. By positioning these, and other likewise divergent essays, side by side the editors have both revealed an ongoing debate of the times and permitted the readers of "The Blue Review" to participate in that debate in absentia.
Once this particular incongruency is resolved, however, a larger question arises: how do the varied genres in "The Blue Review" inform each other and fit together to form a cohesive whole? Though there is no clear answer to this dilemma, "The Esperanto of Art" by W.L. George may offer some key to resolution. To George the compartmentalisation of the arts is problematic: "There is, there must be a link between the painter, the sculptor, the writer, the musician, the actor, [and] the poet" (28). Consequently, he proposes a unified criticism under which all of the arts can be analyzed. This essay, in a way, verbalizes what may be the goal for "The Blue Review" as well. That is, not perhaps the universal lexicon George suggests, but simply the democratization of art. In this "The Blue Review" succeeds by presenting its readers with a heterogeneous mixture of genres, and criticisms of genres, to illuminate that, in George's words, "art is...all of one stuff" (28).
