New Age, The

journal originally founded as a liberal weekly in 1894; it was not a success until it was acquired by A. R. Orage in association with G. B. Shaw and Holbrook Jackson in 1907. Subsequently announcing itself as ‘an independent socialist review of politics, literature, and art’, it became one of the leading periodicals of its day. Although firmly aligned with the Fabian Society, the New Age avoided a narrowly political emphasis through Orage's determination as editor to give it broad cultural scope and authority; in addition to literary contributions from H. G. Wells, J. C. Squire, Arnold Bennett, W. B. Yeats, Katherine Mansfield, and other writers of note, essays on drama, the graphic arts, aesthetics, and philosophy were regularly featured. F. S. Flint, who supplied numerous articles on poetry, attracted T. E. Hulme to the magazine in 1909 as a writer on philosophical topics; Hulme in turn introduced work by Ezra Pound, who published poetry and literary criticism in the New Age and contributed reviews of art and music under the pseudonyms ‘B. H. Dias’ and ‘William Atheling’. The First World War weakened Orage's motivating belief in the socially transformative power of cultural and socio-political discourse; from 1918 onward the magazine was increasingly dominated by his interests in economic theory and more mystical meliorative doctrines, leaving the New Statesman as the principal organ of Fabian Socialism. The editorship passed to Arthur Moore in 1922 when Orage departed for the Gurdjieff Institute in Paris. Although valuable work from Edwin Muir, Oliver St John Gogarty, and Herbert Read appeared during the 1920s, the New Age entered a slow decline and was discontinued in 1938.