Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde

Book excerpt: It has always been difficult to determine Wyndham Lewis's position within the Modernist movement. Despite his status as one of the "big five" modernists -- along with W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce -- Lewis is the least read and least understood of significant modern English writers. At once both modernist and anti-modernist -- Lewis was a founder, before the First World War, of Vorticism and a critic, after the war, of what he considered modernism's sell-out to the art establishment -- he has remained the most obscure and the least easily categorized of the canonical modernists.