SOURCE: "The Revolution of a Poetics," in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 159-79.

In the following essay, Isaak compares the Vorticist movement to Russian Futurism.

"What strikes me as beautiful, what I should like to do," Flaubert wrote, "is a book without external attachments, which would hold itself together by itself through the internal force of its style." Flaubert's dream of an order of art independent of the referential, the representational, was actualized within certain developments of abstractionism in the early 1900s—when art took to analyzing its own ontology. The movements that follow Flaubert's imperative, creating not art contingent upon empirical experience but art as process and mode of perceptual and formal experience, have one characteristic in common—their strategies of abstraction evolved out of a complex nexus of linguistic and plastic media. It is...