Explorations and Epilogue

The covers (front, back, inside front and inside back) of Explorations 2 (April 1954) give 4 pages of a ‘Feenicht’s Playhouse’ newspaper. There are 23 single-spaced reports and one 3-line double spaced insert (on the inside back cover).  It reads:

Now time has reached the flurrying curtain-fall

That wakens thought from historied reverie

And gives the word to uninfected discourse

This is a silent citation from the short-lived1 Laura RidingRobert Graves journal, Epilogue (1935–1938). Riding described the name and the journal (referring to the 3 verse lines) as follows:

…the thing is called Epilogue, meaning that it’s all about what comes after the drama of history, that although it’s after history it represents happenings, though of another kind. And the three verse lines say this too. I don’t want to print Epilogue on the cover just as a magazine name, but as a meaning to remind that Epilogue means a dramatic performance coming after the strict dramatic performance. (…) the play proper is over…2

The citation from Epilogue serves to situate Explorations as a successor au revoir to modernism. Robert Graves was co-editor of Epilogue and a contributor to Explorations.

  1. Explorations was originally intended to be even shorter lived.  A note at the start of the early issues specifies: “Published three times a year for two years.”
  2. Letter from Laura Riding to John Aldridge from March? 1935, cited in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol 1, 2009, 806.