Shot through by the lightning bolt of sex’ was one description of the film A Fool There Was, which premiered at the Strand Theatre in Times Square on 12 January 1915, getting the year off to a bracing start. The film starred Theda Bara as ‘the vampire’, meaning a strong and independent woman to whom men were in helpless thrall: she would quickly become one of early cinema's most sensational stars. Film was the modern medium, now becoming very popular, but each performance of A Fool There Was began with an actor reading out Rudyard Kipling's poem on which the film, via a play, was based. Poetry still took precedence, just about. A different sign of modernity came on 10 April when the well-known sculptor Karl Bitter died after being struck by a car a couple of blocks south of the Strand, at Broadway and West 40th Street, perhaps the first artist to die in this way. Less dramatically, in the cultural field new journals began to proliferate: in March alone there appeared the Ridgefield Gazook, edited by Man Ray, Rogue, edited by Allen Norton, and 291, edited by Marius de Zayas. None would survive for long, but all would eventually be seen as harbingers of new literary and artistic worlds in the process of creation.

The Ridgefield Gazook was the product of a group of young writers and artists who frequented the Grantwood colony at Ridgefield, a small collection of houses on the—still pastoral—Jersey Shore: Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens. A four-page newsletter, it had just the one issue. In town, many of that group attended the salon run by Walter and Louise Arensberg at their apartment at 33 West 67th Street: Marcel Duchamp joined it when he reached New York in June. The Arensbergs’ wealth also supported Rogue, a decadent but genuinely modernist magazine, now renowned for having published several of Wallace Stevens's early poems. Norton, Arensberg, and Stevens had all been to Harvard, but it was a Harvard, as one historian puts it, that had turned its back on Boston and opted for New York.