Title:
BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex
Date of Publication:
June 20, 1914 (no. 1); July 1915 (no. 2)
Place(s) of Publication:
London, England
Toronto, Canada
New York, New York
Frequency of Publication:
Twice
Circulation:
Unknown
Physical Description:
The first issue 9″ x12″ 168 pages, pink cover with BLAST written diagonally in large black letters. It featured a Vorticist Manifesto, along with lists of BLASTS and BLESSINGS. The second issue was 112 pages and its cover featured a Vorticist sketch.
Price:
Unknown
Editor(s):
Wyndham Lewis
Associate Editor(s):
Ezra Pound (Editorial Contributor)
Publishers:
John Lane, The Bodley Head, London
John Lane Company, New York
Bell & Cockburn, Toronto
Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Getty Research Institute; University of California, Los Angeles; Newberry Library; University of Chicago; Northwestern University; University of Illinois; University of Michigan; Princeton University; Whitney Museum of American Art Library; Cornell University; Ohio State University; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Searchable PDFs of full run available online at Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project.
Reprint Editions:
Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow, 1981. Published with Blast no. 3, a festschrift in honor of Wyndham Lewis
New York: Greenwood Reprint Co., 1968
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. Little Magazines. British and European, 1910 – 1919 [Microform]
Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)
BLAST, the brainchild of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, was a highly experimental little magazine created to showcase the burgeoning Vorticist movement. Vorticists aimed to discredit both the “hullo-bulloo” of Futurist “Marinetteism” as well as Imagism’s adherence to “beauty…in the object or content,” and its bold images demonstrated a brash disregard for both the “snobbery” of the elitist avant-garde and the “AUTOMOBILISM” of popular art (Lewis 10). According to Lewis, BLAST was a “battering ram” for the Vorticist movement, a bold attempt to deconstruct the divisions in English society between the poor who “are detestable animals,” and the rich who “are bores without a single exception” (10).
BLAST published only two issues, the June 1914 issue and the July 1915 “War Issue.” The first issue opens with the Vorticist Manifesto and moves to extensive lists of BLASTS and BLESSINGS. These chaotic catalogues address the aesthetics, politics, and popular consciousness of the “great art vortex sprung up in the centre” of England in the early twentieth century (Lewis 9). The second issue contains artwork and contributions from T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among others. The magazine features bold experiments in typography and graphic art, and brazenly declares the goals and beliefs of the short-lived Vorticists.
Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)
The Vorticist Manifesto appeared in the first issue of BLAST, calling for a reinvigoration of British culture with “vivid and violent” art. The eighteen-page manifesto denies any allegiance to class, politics, or a regime, offering an array of BLASTS and BLESSINGS in an attempt to establish BLAST as a forum both produced and consumed by exalted individuals. The BLAST/BLESS section employs binaries in order to disrupt them: England, France, and even the Vorticist audience are damned only to be praised later on in the magazine. Though lacking the typographical nuances of the magazine, below are some exemplar BLASTS and BLESSINGS:
“BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND
Curse its climate for its sins and infections
DISMAL SYMBOL, set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within.
…
CURSE
the flabby sky that can manufacture no snow, but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle like a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges.
…
OH BLAST FRANCE
pig plagiarism BELLY SLIPPERS POODLE TEMPER BAD MUSIC
…
BLAST
APERTIFS (Pernots, Amers picon), Bad change, Naively seductive Houri salon-picture Cocottes, Slouching blue porters (can carry a pantechnicon), Stupidly rapacious people at every step, Economy maniacs, Bouillon Kub (for being a bad pun)
…
BLESS ENGLAND!
For its ships
Which switchback on Blue, Green, and Red SEAS all around the PINK EARTH-BALL
…
BLESS cold magnanimous delicate gauche fanciful stupid ENGLISHMEN.
…
BLESS the HAIRDRESSER
He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee. Hourly he ploughs heads for sixpence, Scours chins and lips for threepence. He makes systematic mercenary war on this WILDNESS.”
Blast. 1:1 (June 1914) 11 – 26.
The editors followed their BLASTS and BLESSINGS with another Manifesto, which consisted of a list of 63 objectives.
Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)
Wyndham Lewis (Nov. 18, 1882 – Mar. 7, 1957)
Editor: Jun. 1914 – Jul. 1915
Percy Wyndham Lewis, editor for BLAST‘s two-issue run and sole editor of The Enemy, was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. Described as an “English Cubist” painter and writer, Lewis enjoyed a respected reputation among London’s young avant-garde and teamed with Ezra Pound in 1912 to form the Vorticist movement. Lewis published BLAST to explain the aesthetic theory and showcase the achievements of the “Anglo-Saxon Genius” of the Vorticists (Lewis, qtd. in Seshagiri 582). The short-lived movement died out after World War I and demand for Lewis’ art floundered as he shifted to studying political theory, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology (Cassidy 5). By the mid-1920s Lewis contributed frequently to a variety of modernist Littles and furiously published dozens of books and manifestos. In a 1922 issue of CriterionLewis proclaimed his role as an adversary to those he labeled “amateurs”, “apes”, and “mock artists” who stole valuable studio space and column inches from “professionals” like him; a few weeks later, Lewis published again in Criterion to announce his new “Enemy” persona against such artistic imposters (Hannah 4). Five years later, Wyndham Lewis created The Enemy as a space for him to distance himself from the disdained avant-garde scene. Despite the scathing reviews he published in his magazine of such widely-acclaimed authors as James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and even Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot described Lewis as ”the most fascinating personality of our time…the most distinguished living novelist” (von der Ropp).
Compiled by Alex Entrekin & Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)
J. Dismorr
“Monologue”
“London Notes”
“June Night”
“Promenade”
“Payment”
“Matilda”
T. S. Eliot
“Preludes”
“Rhapsody of a Windy Night”
Ford Maddox Ford
“The Saddest Story”
“The Old Houses of Flanders”
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Stags
“Vortex (written from the Trenches)”
Wyndham Lewis
“Enemy of the Stars”
“Vortices and Notes”
“Frederick Spencer Gore”
“War Notes”
“Artists and the War”
“The Exploitation of Blood”
“The Six Hundred, Verestehagin and Uccello”
“Marinetti’s Occupation”
“A Review of Contemporary Art”
“The Art of the Great Race”
“Five Art Notes”
“Vortex ‘Be Thyself’”
“Blasts and Blesses”
“The Crowd Master”
Ezra Pound
“Salutation the Third”
“Before Sleep”
“Fratres Minores”
“Vortex”
“His Vision of a Certain Lady Post Mortem”
“Chronicles”
H. Sanders
“A Vision of Mud”
Edward Wadsworth
“Inner Necessity”
Rebecca West
“Indissoluble Matrimony”
Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)
Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.
Images. “Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex.” The Modernist Journals Project. Brown University. 14 July 2009.
Kadlec, David. “Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism”. ELH, 60.4 (Winter 1993): 1015-1031.
The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 14 July 2009.
Reynolds, Paige. “‘Chaos Invading Concept’: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture”. Twentieth Century Literature, 46.2 (Summer 2000): 1015-1031.
Seshagiri, Urmila. “Racial Politics, Modernist Poetics.” Modernism: A Comparative History of Literature in European Languages. Eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2007. 582.
Tuma, Keith. “Wyndham Lewis, Blast, and Popular Culture.” ELH, 54.2 (Summer 1987): 403-419.
Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)