SOURCE: "The English Vortex: Modern Literature and the Pattern of Hope," in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. III, No. 5, July, 1974, pp. 1123-39.

In the following essay, Materer provides an overview of Vorticist theories and artistic forms.

At the age of 77, Ezra Pound published his final memorial to the Vortex, the association he began with Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot in the crisis year of 1914. "From Canto CXV," one of Pound's Drafts & Fragments, laments the disappointed hopes of the group and commemorates its central figure, Wyndham Lewis. The poem opens with an extravagant but moving tribute to Lewis:

The scientists are in terror and the European mind stops Wyndham Lewis chose blindness rather than have his mind stop.

A brain tumor blinded Lewis in 1951. He "chose blindness" when he refused to undergo surgery that risked darkening his mental faculties. Lewis continued to paint even while his sight was...