Rosenquist Blast

By Rod Rosenquist ___________________ London, literature and BLAST: the vorticist as crowd master ___________________

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Vorticism, though mostly made up of painters and
sculptors, is drawn into our literary histories by
the central role Ezra Pound played in its conception
and the fact that Wyndham Lewis, its main
protagonist, is perhaps equally renowned as a
painter and a writer. The fact vorticism plays more
easily into the history of the plastic arts is born
up by the fact that such a thing as vorticist style
in painting is perhaps readily recognizable to the
initiated viewer, whereas the vorticist style within
literature, though sometimes identified by literary
critics, is not so easily distinguishable from any
other distinctly modernist writing.¹
Even vorticist painting might be seen as an abstract
form positioned near the point that cubism meets
expressionism or futurism, blurring the edges
between these concurrent modern art movements with a
synthesizing approach, though not radically
different from them. Vorticist prose is even more
difficult to distinguish. For this reason we might
be forgiven, in searching for definitions and
characteristics of this English avant-garde
movement, for turning to Ezra Pound, who fortunately
for us expressed the foundational principles in a
chapter of his 1916 book on the sculpture of
vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound, however,
really only outlines the central image and how the
vortex might form an illustration of the artist’s
role in his or her culture. In other words, rather
than describing techniques of vorticist poetry and
art (although he does describe imagist
techniques as a substitute), Pound simply makes an
attempt to justify the name, applying the vortex as
an idea of the artist standing as an anchoring
center to the swirling chaos of modern thought.
Similarly, Pound’s explanations lead us to a
recognition of a sense of place within the initial
conception of vorticism. Just as the artist provides
the stable center of the personal vortex, so the
city might be seen as the stabilizing center of the
movement’s vortex.

    BLAST,
the 1914 to 1915 journal of the Great English
Vortex, was meant to be in this way directly linked
to London, drawing all elements of culture and art
through a vision of the city and its citizens—in
this way purposefully subjectifying its approach to
universal history and culture through the
specifically London gaze. One of the primary goals
of BLAST seemed to have been to create a
specifically English form of the European avant-garde
of that time, given their initial association with
Marinetti and Italian futurism, then their
subsequent (and violent) dissociation.² Lewis and the other
vorticists make clear in their founding manifestoes
in BLAST that the movement is intended to
match the need for an art of a more ‘northern’
climate rather than a ‘latin’ one. This leads the
imagination to ‘a mysticism, madness and delicacy
peculiar to the North.’³
The vorticists were careful to remain free of mere
patriotism or chauvinism, not preferring
English art to French, German or Italian; rather
they wanted to recognize that the English had a
distinct contribution to be made to the world’s
culture and art alongside the other movements.

    This
vague concentration on ‘northerness,’ however, does
not fully answer all the questions raised as to what
it means when Lewis calls himself the leader of ‘the
Great London Vortex’.⁴
While the Englishness of vorticism has been
documented, the role the city itself plays in the
shaping of the movement has been sometimes
overlooked. Lewis’s view of England would always
take a London-centric perspective, and the city
became a great symbol to the other vorticists as a
monumental, cold, even classical city, particularly
(maybe paradoxically) when compared to what they saw
as the Latin warmth of the more Romantic aspects of
Marinetti’s movement. The opening words of BLAST
declare: ‘Long live the great art vortex sprung up
in the center of this town’, announcing from the
start that the movement was intended to remain
situated in and around the English capital. The list
of BLASTs and blesses themselves focus on
certain visions of London life, as general as ‘the
London cloud [that] sucks the town’s heart’ or as
specific as Reverend Pennyfeather, Pound’s noisy
neighbor in the Kensington Church, or the Victorian
‘purgatory of Putney.’ However, London’s centrality
to vorticism remained little more than this in the
first issue of BLAST: a statement of
intent that vorticism was to be a distinctly
English—even a London—movement and a handful of
contemporary references and inside jokes.

    By
the second and final issue of BLAST, dated
July 1915, war had already taken its effect on the
city and, more importantly to Lewis and his friends,
its resulting approach to art. Whereas Lewis and the
vorticists had, in 1914, been readily adopted as
figureheads of a homegrown avant-garde
movement—the very toast of the bourgeoisie they
were, in theory at least, challenging with their
revolutionary art—the war, a little over a year
later, had changed tastes enough that aggressive
tactics in the art world seemed not only trivial but
in bad taste.⁵ For
this reason, BLAST 2 is a less
antagonistic magazine, finding that the former
demand for an attack on the establishment had been
filled by war itself. Unfortunately, it also seems
to render the second issue of this important journal
less of interest to literary or art critics who
prefer to focus on the initial, more radical break.
But it is with the second BLAST that the
importance of the city in general—London in
particular—takes its rightful role in the art and
literature of the magazine. Among a number of
designs and reproductions of paintings with cities
as their subject matter, Etchells’s ‘Hyde Park’

    It is
Lewis’s extended survey, though, entitled ‘A Review
of Contemporary Art’, that forms the central focus
of this second issue and sets the tone for the rest
of the magazine. It is here that Lewis most clearly
outlines where vorticism fits into the various
movements of European avant-garde art of
the time, examining in turn cubism, futurism and
expressionism. Tributes are paid out to all three
movements and their most representative
practitioners (Picasso—Balla, Severini, and
Boccioni—Kandinsky), but in turn each is shown to
have fallen short of the ultimate goal of Lewis’s
ideal artist. Cubism is criticized for its passive
approach to its subject, often taking the still life
or, in Lewis’s preferred phrase, the nature-morte
approach. Lewis sees this as reducing the artist’s
vitality through a ‘relaxed initiative,’ failing to
represent the involvement in life which marks the
truly great and revolutionary artist. Lewis goes on
to say, ‘However musical or vegetarian a man may be,
his life is not spent exclusively amongst apples and
mandolines’ (BLAST 2, p41). Clearly the
problem with the cubists, according to Lewis, is not
in their execution, their style or their ‘taste’,
since Picasso at least, as Lewis says elsewhere, ‘is
one of the ablest living painters.’⁶
The problem comes in how Picasso’s ability is used,
since such ‘tours-de-force of taste,’ while
wonderfully executed and arranged, ‘are too inactive
and uninventive for our northern climates’ (BLAST
2, p41).

    The
futurists, on the other hand, are applauded for
their ‘vivacity and high-spirits.’ Unlike the
cubists, they engage their audience with more
wide-ranging images than can be found on the table
top, and devote themselves to artistic theory and
revolutionary propaganda. Yet in their devotion to
talking about
art, Lewis remarks, they never manage ‘the great
plastic qualities that the best cubist pictures
possess’ (BLAST
2, p42). The futurists are so caught up in the
vitality of their passions that they fail to master
their ideas and likewise fail to ‘sufficiently
dominate the contents of their pictures.’ The
futurists become prisoners, Lewis suggests, of their
own spontaneous association with action, with the
machine, and, most importantly, with the public—for
they are ultimately similar to ‘the best modern
Popular Art’. According to Lewis, futurism was,
paradoxically, the movement of the present moment
and of the masses, suggesting, ‘Futurism and
identification with the crowd, is a huge hypocrisy.’
The futurist artists could not escape the passions
and propaganda of the crowd and therefore could
never perform with the heightened ability of the
cubists. They were never enough in control of the
painting’s relationship to themselves or their
audience to create their intended effects.

    In
turning to Kandinsky, Lewis spends less time
exploring expressionism than he does beginning to
outline his ideal ‘new synthesis’ of these three
forms, specifically finding space for vorticism in
between the cold and removed craftsmanship of the
cubist nature-morte and the fiery passion and engagement
of the futurist abstract painting. The English
vorticists were not to simply dabble in decorations
or stylistics, taking a wider vision of life of the
streets as their subject matter. Yet unlike the
futurists, they would not get caught up in the
passions of that life or the propaganda of the
political or commercial slogan, but retain the
clinical removal of the craftsman at all times, to
see what everyone might see but through the eyes of
the painter. Kandinsky and the expressionists
seemed, according to Lewis, to have found a position
somewhere between the poles of craft and passion,
but their focus on abstraction comes at the cost of
the painting’s connection to something real and
therefore relevant to the social life. For while
Lewis is certainly an abstract artist (at this
point), art is only really art for Lewis if it is
tied to some change beyond the merely stylistic.

    Having
briefly outlined Lewis’s conception of vorticist
art, we can then look to the literary contributions
which immediately followed the essay in BLAST 2. The most famous, the first ever
contribution of poems to an English audience by T.S.
Eliot, comprise his four ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on
a Windy Night’, none of which seem particularly
vorticist or even mention London, although all are
focused on evocative representations of urban scenes
which could be seen to encompass a specifically
London city life. While Pound, in both the first and
second issues, had rather unsuccessfully tried to
produce poetic equivalents of the vorticist arts
promoted by the magazine, Eliot’s work (which was
very much not his own first choice of poetry for BLAST but favored by Lewis, who was
disinclined to print the obscene verse first
submitted) brought in a more quiet and respectful
literary contribution to the otherwise avant-garde posturing of the magazine. In this
way, Eliot was playing the role Ford Madox Hueffer
had played in the first issue, that of ‘the straight
man’ next to the vorticist pranksters, showing that
lasting literary arts might also take their place in
such a timely periodical.⁷ These poems are perhaps more
personal, more lyrical, than much of what Eliot
would write in years to come; yet in centering
themselves on the poet’s outward gaze, away from
self and into the city, reflecting in many ways
Baudelaire’s influence on modern English poetry,
these poems were already establishing their own
modern program of depersonalization. Strongly visual
in style, there is little emotion, little passion or
energy, to draw the poet into his own work. These
are not futurist poems, full of the pace or clamor
of machines; neither are they purely stylistic
expositions of words, although there can be little
doubt that the formal experimenting of poetic
‘preludes’ is a tactic closer to Lewis’s conception
of literary cubism than to expressionism or
futurism. If nothing else, Eliot’s work, in being
city-centric, fits into the vorticist context in
theme, if not fully in technique.

    Eliot’s
poetry, though, is followed by several other
literary contributions that have received much less
attention, but which, in many ways, fit more clearly
into the vorticist style than anything else printed
in BLAST.
Perhaps this is because both writers, Jessica
Dismorr and Wyndham Lewis, were themselves more
widely known as vorticist painters and therefore
understood better what vorticist technique might
look like when dressed in print rather than pigment.
Lewis had already, to an extent, shown himself
capable of this in the first issue with the
invention of the BLAST typeface and his contribution of the
vorticist play, The Enemy of the Stars. Yet Lewis’s play is set in an
abstract space somewhere outside our own world, more
like his novel The Childermass than his works centered upon the
city in general and London specifically. London
would reclaim its place as central character in the
second issue, in these works following Eliot’s
poetry.

    Jessica
Dismorr was, by the time she fell in with Lewis and
his Rebel Arts Centre in which she played a
significant role, ‘already an accomplished Fauvist
interested in dance and the Bergsonian ethos of Rhythm.’⁸ Douglas Goldring, present at the
initial meeting for the conception of BLAST, described her as ‘an advanced
painter and poetess’ who was unfortunately sent for
tea while the rest of the group came up with lists
of names for BLASTing and blessing. Dismorr has, to our
own misfortune, always remained somewhat obscured by
the position Lewis sought for her. However, in the
early years of the war, when BLAST 2 was being put together, she was
one of the few members of the movement Lewis could
count on, and her poetry and prose find their way
into the magazine alongside her visual work. Of her
literary contributions, several are centered upon
visualizations of London. One, a short narrative
entitled ‘June Night’, describes the female
narrator’s rendezvous with ‘Rodengo’ (a Latin type
who, like Marinetti, is criticized for his romantic
temperament), travelling on a No. 43 bus from the
suburbs past Regent’s Park. The narrator feels bored
by her Latin lover whose ‘temperature is always
above 98 1/2′ and presses against her in the crowded
bus. The narrator escapes the bus before they reach
their destination, pulled away by the empty streets
near Regent’s Park and the temptation of ‘cool
normality and classicism.’ A distinction reappears
constantly between the hard, cool structure of the
buildings and streets and the hot ‘throbbing’ press
of the streets and the crowds. She writes,

I take refuge in the
mews and by-ways. They lead to the big squares of
the better neighbourhoods. […] Moonlight carves
them in purity. The presence of these great and
rectangular personalities is a medicine. They are
the children of colossal restraint, they are the
last word in prose. (Poetics, your day is over!) In
admiring them I have put myself on the side of all
the severities. I seek the profoundest teachings of
the inanimate. I feel the emotion of related shapes.
(BLAST 2, p68)

    Dismorr
is clearly writing as
a vorticist here, preferring the cold, classical
hardness of the London buildings and streets to the
heat and bustle of the crowd and her rather one-sided
love affair. She reads the city very much as if it
were a sculpture, preferring the more cubist
construction of architecture and flagstones to that of
the uproar of the human flux.

    Dismorr’s
vorticist representation of the city is more
distinct, however, in another piece, ‘London Notes’,
a collection of observations of identifiable
locations throughout the metropolis described in
distinctly visual terms, perhaps best described as
sculptural, bearing a distinct resemblance to
Gaudier-Brzeska’s vorticist manifestoes, especially
where he writes: ‘I shall derive my emotions solely
from the arrangement of surfaces, I shall present my
emotions by the arrangement of my surfaces, the
planes and lines by which they are defined’ (BLAST
2, p34). Dismorr, likewise, writes of what she sees
as a visual artist, but represents both the city and
the emotions behind her gaze in strictly literary
lines, planes and surfaces, providing a distinctly
vorticist prose accompaniment to Etchells’s visual
illustration. She writes:

IN PARK LANE.

Long necked feminine structures
support almost without grimacing the elegant
discomfort of restricted elbows.



HYDE PARK.

Commonplace, titanic figures
with a splendid motion stride across the parched
plateau of grass, little London houses only a foot
high huddle at their heels. (66)

    She
leads the reader through the British Museum and the
old Reading Room, into a busy Piccadilly, full of
signs, scaffolding, cranes and mannequined shop
windows, and, lastly, to

FLEET STREET.

Precious slips of houses, packed
like books on a shelf, are littered all over with
signs and letters.

A dark, agitated stream
struggles turbulently along the channel bottom;
clouds race overhead.

Curiously exciting are so many
perspective lines, withdrawing, converging; they
indicate evidently something of importance beyond
the limits of sight. (66)

    Dismorr
seems a painter foremost, always arranging her
scenes according to visual composition and framing
them as snapshots. Yet there is something within the
textual style, I believe, which reveals a literary
talent writing within the vorticist mode, perhaps
taking her stylistic cue from Lewis’s earlier play,
but adding an element of her own through the
seemingly simple pedestrian’s gaze. Her description
of Park Lane is clearly located somewhere in between
the vorticist/cubist designs in the magazine and
Eliot’s own city-centric observations, just as it
seems somewhere between formalism and expressionism,
focusing equally on the ‘long necked feminine
structures’ and on the more internal ‘discomfort of
restricted elbows.’ Clearly the human elements
mingle, though sometimes in unusual ways, with the
non-human structures—the cubism—of London’s streets
and buildings. The ‘dark agitated stream’,
representing the futurist turbulence of the Fleet
Street current below the high buildings, is an
important counterbalance to the vision of the purely
cubist cityscape: the flux of traffic and thronging
crowds forms a more organic element, particularly
placed next to the vision of houses ‘packed like
books on a shelf, […] littered all over with signs
and letters.’

    Perhaps
the best visual
representation of this image of the city was
produced by Wyndham Lewis rather than Dismorr.
Started in 1914 and completed the following year,
just as BLAST
no.2 was published, Lewis’s painting The
Crowd provides a useful
counterpart to the literary texts we are here
looking at.

	Wyndham Lewis The Crowd oil paint & graphite on canvas Exhibited 1915 via The Tate Museum www.tate.org.uk __________________

The buildings and streets of the
city are clearly represented in a highly cubist style.
Yet, in his depiction of the crowds, also done in a
cubist style but retaining much of the energy and flux
which the futurists were keen to express, Lewis
manages within a unified composition to bring together
the heat of the crowds with the coolness of the
buildings, to balance the Romantic sensibility of the
throng with the classical structure of the city
itself. While the cubist structure of the buildings
and streets is perhaps the first thing noticed, it is
the mass of people that gives the painting its name,
and subsequently raises the most interesting
questions. Tom Normand, commenting on the painting,
recognizes that the regularized, depersonalized and
standardized patterns of the modern city are reflected
in the conception of the crowd, reducible to its own
collective patterns of undifferentiated and produced
instinct rather than individual thought.⁹ The seeming revolution
on the city streets evident in The Crowd is
positioned in the rhetoric of democracy, liberty, and
individuality, but is oddly represented by
indistinguishable stick figures, reproduced by the
painter in almost a distinctly vorticist manner, as a
series of boxes, lines and planes.

    Lewis
provides his own literary companion-piece to this
painting in BLAST 2, an unfinished
narrative published as a fragment called ‘The Crowd
Master’. The scene is established as London, July
1914, just before war would break out. It opens with
‘Men drift[ing] in thrilling masses past the
Admiralty, cold night tide. Their throng creeps
round corners, breaks faintly here and there up
against a railing […] THE POLICE with distant icy
contempt herd London’ (BLAST 2, p94). And
while it is always only London the city which
provides the backdrop to this observation of the
crowd, with identifiable sites appearing and
reappearing throughout, it is the nature of the
crowd which consumes Lewis’s gaze. Time is as
important as place since it is the build-up to war
which gives the crowd its futurist energy, its
purpose. Lewis writes, ‘THE CROWD is the first
mobilisation of a country,’ and it is in this role
that Lewis wants to observe it, an attempt to
understand what makes up a country within its own
city streets especially as it is led (for the crowd
never leads) toward military engagement with some
wholly other country with its own crowd mobilized
within its own city streets. Lewis states that ‘Wars
begin with this huge indefinite interment in the
cities’ (BLAST 2, p94).

    In
discussing the nature of the individual within this
specifically London crowd building up to war, it is
important to outline how far the crowd represents,
for Lewis, the opposite of peace. The energy of the
multitude means war, just as death is, in the end,
‘only a form of Crowd. It is a similar surrender’ (BLAST 2, p94). To enter the crowd is to
lose one’s individuality, sacrificing solitude and
peace for the energy and passion of the collective.
Lewis describes the cheering on the streets: ‘For
days now wherever you are you hear a sound like a
very harsh perpetual voice of a shell. If you put W
before it, it always makes WAR!’ The voice of the
crowd, though raised collectively in affirmation, is
the very sound of coming death, although death is
something that, unlike war, only the individual can
experience. The London crowd moves toward war
happily, blindly and ‘with a first puppy-like
intensity.’ The violence of their affirmation of the
collective life is paradoxical, a futurist step
forward into annihilation. There seems little
alternative, since the march towards mobilisation of
the country seems resolved ahead of time—almost
machine-like in Lewis’s descriptions. He writes,
‘The only possibility of renewal for the individual
is into this temporary Death and Resurrection of the
Crowd.’ The noise and commotion of the multitude
draws everyone into its energy, and every individual
is a type of martyr to the collective consciousness.
At least in recompense, we are told, the ‘certainty
of feeling alike with everyone else was a great
relief’ (BLAST 2, p98).

    I
would like to look very briefly beyond this fragment
of the narrative to another which Lewis would have
published in the third number of BLAST had it followed the other two. (He
later reproduced it as part of his memoirs in 1937).
In this section of ‘The Crowd Master’ we watch the
narrator (in this later printing named Cantleman,
the same hero of other Lewis works) engaging in
‘experiments’ with the crowd. ‘He moved immediately
to the center of London […] rapping on the window
for [his taxicab] to stop where the crowd seemed
densest and stupidest. […] He allowed himself to
be carried by the crowd. He offered himself to its
emotion, which saturated him at length’ (BB 80). He finds that these emotions
are merely electricity, passing aimlessly from
individual to individual when they are in tune with
the group. Cantleman describes himself as a medium,
interpreting human messages which get passed through
the crowd, but makes no sense of them. He trains
himself ‘to act its mood‘, engaging in a role-playing
investigation: ‘He disposed his body in a certain
way, slouched heavily along, fixed his eyes ahead of
him. Soon he had become an entranced medium’ (81).
Without warning, while thinking of something else,
he receives an electric shock, a distinct message
from the mind of the crowd which he had
penetrated—the ‘cerebration of this jellyfish.’ The
message he receives from this group mind can only be
defined as ‘that married
feeling‘, where
a ‘single man experiences sensation of married
state. The Family. The Crowd.’ Cantleman, the
bachelor, in training himself to divine the secrets
of the crowd, suddenly feels a sense of belonging
inscribed by the crowd onto the ‘tabula rasa he
offered them’ (82).

    Caught
up in this collective feeling, Cantleman retires to
a cafe to record his data. But when he returns to
the crowd he is disappointed to find no connection,
and a feeling of detachment returns—of singleness.
As he climbs onto the ‘plinth of the Nelson Column’
in Trafalgar Square, he feels more connected to the
cold stone than he does to ‘the extensive human
lake’ surrounding him. Cantleman begins to
communicate with the spirit of Lord Nelson instead,
electing to act as medium for the dead hero through
his representative statue, and receives a sensation
of what he calls ‘immediate bawdiness’, a vision
coming to him, transmitted through the statue, of
Lady Hamilton dressed in ‘tight fitting bathing
drawers.’ Cantleman is disappointed to find the
Crowd incapable of presenting him with such an
immense sensation and his final comment is: ‘The
English Crowd is a stupid dragon. It ought not to be
allowed out alone!’ (BB 83).

    Cantleman’s
disappointment in the Crowd is Lewis’s as well, just
as the initial curiosity belonged to them both. What
is worth noting, though, is the expectation that
communion with the spirit of the crowd was possible
or even profitable and would lead to an
understanding of the collective unconscious of
London. Instead, Lewis, writing of his own
experiences (as he later tells us) through
Cantleman, finds it easier to communicate human
emotion through the crafted monument, through the
cold hard lines and planes of sculpted stonework,
than through the ongoing flux and drift of the crowd
itself. This is the meaning of the Crowd Master, not
to be defined, as Lewis tells us, as one who is
master of the crowd, but one who can master
himself while in the crowd (BB 84). This is also, in some ways, the
definition of vorticism, recognizing the motion and
the flux of human life, as the futurists had done
before them, but always from an isolated position of
classical detachment, grounded firmly within the
more cubist structure of the modern city—as artists
capable of transmitting the message of the
collective mind but without taking part in that
collective themselves. The cubists had been,
according to Lewis, unwilling to wade into life on
the street. The futurists on the other hand, in
their enthusiasm for the crowd, had lost their heads
and could not master even themselves, let alone
their art. Lewis’s character of the crowd master is
the ideal vorticist, judging the crowd through his
own experience of it so that it might be accurately
fixed to the canvas or the page, but always
remaining in control of his involvement within the
energy or the flux of collective humanity.

Editor’s
Note:  Rod Rosenquist’s essay first appeared in
FlashPoint #6.

___________________________

Footnotes

1.    This
might be explained by Reed Way Dasenbrock’s
hypothesis that what we consider ‘modernist’
writing has its foundation (‘its seedbed or
laboratory’) in the literary experiments of early
Vorticism, and therefore no real distinction can
be made. See The Literary Vorticism of Ezra
Pound and Wyndham Lewis (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) p150.

2.    While BLAST was, in the
early days, intended to be a ‘cubist, futurist,
imagist’ magazine, an open letter to the editor of
‘The Observer’ announced, without using the word
vorticist, that Lewis and his followers would insist
that any implied association between themselves and
Marinetti’s brand of futurism would be considered
‘an impertinence.’ See Lewis’s letter, dated June
14th 1914, in The Letters of Wydham Lewis,
ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963)
p62.

3.    BLAST no.1 (June 1914) p37.
Hereafter references to issues No.1 or No. 2 (July
1915) will be given parenthetically in text as BLAST
1 or BLAST 2.

4.    This phrase was only used in
retrospect; see Wyndham Lewis, BLASTing
and Bombardiering, revised edition (London:
Calder, 1982) p21.

5.    See David Peters Corbett, The
Modernity of English Art: 1914-1930
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997),
especially his first chapter, ‘Radical Modernism
1914-1918′ for a discussion of how popular opinion
toward avant-garde art, Lewis’s in
particular, changed with the First World War,
pp25-56.

6.    Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s
Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex?
(London: Egoist, 1919). Lewis’s chapter on Picasso
is probably his most clear attack on modernist
aestheticism (its ‘executant’ and ‘art for art’s
sake’ qualities) as would be expanded by Lewis’s
prose in the following decade to include Joyce,
Pound and Stein. Lewis takes a particularly
avant-garde antagonism toward modernist autonomy, as
illustrated (not in this specific context) by Peter
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.
Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984)

7.    It might be worth noting that
Hueffer’s story, which went on to become The
Good Soldier, and Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ are the
only literary works from BLAST which could
be said to have a wide readership outside of the
context of the magazine.

8.    Paul Edwards, Wyndham
Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000) p102.

9.    Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis
the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p7.