Calendar of Modern Letters, The

a journal of criticism, poetry, and fiction founded in 1925 by Edgell Rickword, Douglas Garman, and Bertram Higgins as a forum for critical discourse of a standard they felt the Criterion, had initiated but failed to maintain. Poetry by Roy Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding was published and Llewellyn Powys and William Plomer were among the contributors of short stories. The Calendar was noted for its consistent attention to European literature, articles on Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Chekhov serving to increase British awareness of their work; its international contributors included Hart Crane, Robert Frost, and Luigi Pirandello. A Coleridgean insistence on the combination of emotion and intellect in good writing characterized the journal's consensus of critical opinion. E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Desmond MacCarthy, J. C. Ransom, and Aldous Huxley were among the critics and essayists whose work sustained the clear, objective, and intellectually rigorous tone of the Calendar's essays and reviews. The magazine ceased appearing in 1927, its circulation having fallen from a level of above 7,000 copies in its first year to around 1,000 by the tenth of its twelve issues. It was reissued in 1966 with an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, who spoke of its ‘higher skill in exegesis than had been commonly found … in any critical paper’. Two volumes of essays from its ‘Scrutinies’ section were published under Rickword's editorship in 1928 and 1931; F. R. Leavis, for whom the Calendar was an example in the establishment of Scrutiny, edited a further selection under the title Towards Standards of Criticism in 1933.