Editorial

• Published in: The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 2019-01, Vol.10, p.6-9
• Main Authors: Bonafede, Francesca, Kane, Louise, Mills, Gareth, Shallcross, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Aesthetics; British culture; Cultural factors; Editorials; Modernism; Modernity; Pandemics; Poetry; War; Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
• ISSN: 2052-5168

Not for nothing did W. B. Yeats deem Lewis's satirical vision in The ChUdermass (1928) 'as powerful as "Gulliver"'.1 And if the creator of the Bailiff still has much to say to our historical moment, so does the author of 'The Second Coming': in the first seven months of 2016, with the EU referendum debate at its height, data analysis showed that Yeats's poetic vision of 'anarchy [...] loosed upon the world' had been quoted more often in news sources than in any comparable period of the past three decades.2 The aesthetic and philosophical affinity of Lewis and Yeats - what the latter described as their fundamental agreement', after having read Time and Western Man (1927) - is the subject of the first of our articles, in which Roula-Maria Dib examines their symbolic use of the images of the vortex and the gyre.3 While detailing the ways in which Yeats' mature thought was influenced by the intellectual energy of pre- and post-war London, especially his friendship with Ezra Pound, Dib considers Lewis's artistic innovations both as an anticipation of, and a cross-medial complement to, Yeats's symbolic interest in the 'accumulated cluster [ingj of geometric images', which is presented throughout his poetry as a potential 'bridge [between] the physical and the spiritual, and even the scientific and the spiritual'. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman have drawn attention to the scholarly imperative to research Lewis's involvement with periodicals in greater depth, asserting that 'there is a larger possible project lurking behind a restricted investigation of Lewis's journals'.4 As a contribution to this task, Judith Hendra's article, 'Wyndham Lewis and The New Aged sheds much-needed light on Lewis's involvement with early twentieth-century periodical culture, in the context of his relationship with one key journal, The New Age, illustrating the artistic, historical, and writerly contexts that form the backdrop to Lewis's development as an art critic. Wragg examines the political identity of Tarr and its relationship to modernity and modernist cultures, finding the externalist theory of art expounded by its protagonist to play a crucial role in understanding Lewis's further 'attempts to defamiliarize the lifeworld' of commodified modernity. Nonetheless, like Lewis himself, the journal has always combined a commitment to intellectual rigour with a certain quality of standing askance, and we will be cautious to safeguard this harmonious and sane duality even as we bo