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EZRA POUND 101
Wyndham Lewis made a notable statement in this, the last issue
of Blast:
"We are not only 'the last men of epoch!' . . . We are more
than that. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized.
We belong to a 'great age' that has not 'come off.' We moved
too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace. And, more
and more exhausted by the War, Slump and Revolution, the world
has fallen back."
The following year, in a postscript to the now defunct movement,
Pound wrote a letter to the editor of Reedy's Mirror, July 30,
1916, correcting a misstatement which had appeared in the journal:
". . . I am not 'the head of the vorticist movement.' . . . As
an active and informal association it might be said that Lewis
supplied the volcanic force, Brzeska the animal energy, and perhaps
that I had contributed to certain Confucian calm and reserve."
The "Confucian calm and reserve" of which Pound speaks were
hardly evident in Blast, one of the most daring publications with
which he was associated. He made some pertinent comments on
form in the letter to Reedy's Mirror:
". . . The great mass of mankind are ignorant of the shape of
nearly everything that they see or handle. The artisan knows the
shape of some of his tools. You know the shape of your penhandle
but hardly the shape of your typewriter. The store of forms
in the average man's head is smaller than his meager verbal
vocabulary."