Vorticism

Vorticism was a short-lived British avant-garde movement founded in 1914 by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, who edited its combative literary-artistic magazine BLAST, and drew in the poet Ezra Pound, who coined the movement's name, as its principal literary theorist. Reacting against both the softness of Impressionism and what its members saw as Futurism's uncritical celebration of speed and machinery, Vorticism sought an art and literature of hard-edged, geometric energy organized around a still vortex of maximum force, expressed in Lewis's own experimental fiction and polemical prose and in Pound's contemporaneous poetry. The movement's momentum was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, in which several of its associated artists were killed, and Vorticism is generally remembered as Britain's most significant contribution to the pre-war European avant-garde and as a formative episode in Ezra Pound's development toward Imagism and his later work.