SOURCE: "Vorticism among the Isms," in Blast 3, edited by Seamus Cooney and others, Black Sparrow Press, 1984, pp. 40-6.

In the following essay, Dasenbrock considers Vorticism in in the context of other literary and artistic movements of the period.

Though BLAST is principally thought of today as the magazine of Vorticism, it was planned and announced before the birth of Vorticism, and, indeed, most of the first issue was laid out before the Vorticist manifestos which open and close that issue were conceived. Pound wrote to Joyce on April 1, 1914, that "Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly," and the advertisement for BLAST which appeared in The Egoist on April 15, 1914, announced it as a "Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." The most telling evidence that BLAST preceded Vorticism is in BLAST itself. In one of Lewis's notes, "The Melodrama of Modernity," he...