SOURCE: "A Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXV, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 512-19.

In the following essay, Sypher discusses the artists associated with Vorticism.

Well under way is a revival of interest in the era of World War I, and not only as the first machine age. Witness the many books on the Great War, on Bloomsbury, on Wyndham Lewis as critic, novelist, and apostle of Vorticist art. Richard Cork's two monumental folio volumes [Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. Vol. 1: Origins and Development. 322 pages; Vol. 2: Synthesis and Decline], lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, at last record the full story of Vorticism, that brief, sometimes comic, episode in art and criticism intensely focused in London between 1913 and the early days of the war. Born amid the furor roused by Marinetti's Futurist obsession with the machine and Wyndham Lewis's revolt against Impressionism...