The Dial

The Dial


An American magazine, The Dial was published intermittently from 1840-1929 and took several different forms. In its first form, published from 1840-1844, The Dial served as the major publication of the Transcendentalist movement. From the 1880s-1919, the magazine was revived and primarily published political reviews and literary criticism. In its final and most successful form, from 1920-1929, The Dial functioned as an influential outlet for modernist literature. 

Directed by Scofield Thayer and Dr. James Sibley Watson, the magazine published influential art, poetry, and fiction. Along with several of Yeats’s poems, The Dial was the first U.S. publication to print T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The magazine also published a number of influential artists ranging from Van Gogh, Matisse, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The magazine also reported on the cultural life of European capitals and writers in exile.  


Yeats published a number of poems in The Dial which were later featured in The Tower:

Owen Ahern and his Dancers (November 1920)

Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen (September 1921)

Meditations in Time of Civil War (1923)

Leda and the Swan (June 1924)

Among School Children (August 1927)