SOURCE: "From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art," in English Literary History, Vol. 56, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 689-720.

In the following essay, Rae examines the art and literature of the Vorticist movement.

Ezra Pound's proudest contribution to the Vorticist journal Blast, and the only poem that he was ever to identify as "pure vorticism," was a "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess." The images in this poem, the brightly colored combatants in a fierce and immediate battle, are nouns transformed into verbs, chesspieces metaphorically identified with the Roman letters that trace their actions. These luminous pawn-Y's, bishop-X's, and knight-L's strike, cleave, and loop one another, breaking and reforming their pattern until an assault on a king renders one army victorious—and the black-and-white design of the empty chessboard, for a moment, definitive. The truce, however, is brief. Harnessed energy leaks, the...