Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays

by Wyndham Lewis, Alan Munton (Editor)

At the beginning of his career Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) wrote vigorous poetry, and plays which in their form and vehement characterisation resemble the later work of Samuel Beckett. This volume includes major One-Way Song , and Enemy of the Stars in its two very different versions, as well as other writings that can now be seen as central to the formation of Lewis's work. The plays and poems crackle with ferocious energy, concentrated and brilliant, as Lewis creates a literary equivalent to the visual revolutions of Cubism and Vorticism. He explores how an artist should think and write in an oppressive world, the relationship between imagination and action. This edition, with Alan Munton's annotations, is a definitive text based on Lewis's own final corrections. An introduction by C.H. Sisson places these radical works in the context of Lewis's other writings.

Genres: Poetry

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

was there anything he couldn't do? (except make sensible interpersonal and political decisions)

[oswald · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book. With the One-Way Song, the question is whether he actually pulls off the transmutation of personality he apparently tries for everywhere in his work. . . whether he was after all merely writing flavorless extraneoclassical verslets, or succeeded in erecting a monument to his own palate.

It must also be decided whether anyone else could have written this. It is certain that no one else would have tried, but I can't say there's a single rhyme in the whole thing that another man couldn't have come up with. So the question arises, what did he want with this form? Maybe nothing but the pitter-patter of "enemy salvoes".

There is no doubt of the authorship of the plays. These seem to be exquisite pictures in fine detail, but it's possible he's just breathlessly smashing adjectives together. Either way the effect is magnificent.

Lewis is typically more the preacher than the professor, but he depicts himself in the latter role in an elegiac section of the One-Way Song, and consummates the image in the essay at the end of the book. There we see what has been very rare for a long time: a sincere and unaffected appreciation for Plato.