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On December 3, 1924, Ezra Pound wrote from the Italian town of Rapallo to Percy Wyndham Lewis in London: "I have just, ten years and a bit after its appearance, and in this far distant locus, taken out a copy of the great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus. We were hefty guys in them days; and of what has come after us, we seem to have survived without a great mass of successors" (Lewis and Pound 138). The "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus" to which Pound refers in his letter was the first number of the magazine BLAST, published in June 1914.1 The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis-its main editor-recalled BLAST as the "hugest and pinkest of all magazines" (Rude Assignment 135). The magazine clearly had a special significance for both men, who cite it throughout their forty-three-year-long correspondence; indeed, no other entry is indexed as frequently as BLAST, which literally spans from the first to the last letter (cf. Pound and Lewis). Pound in particular keeps coming back to it over and over; in 1914, he requests galley proofs of the magazine from Lewis, and in 1957, only a month before Lewis's death brought an end to their long, complicated friendship, Pound complains of a radio show which "in noticing the disease of modern awt listed all movements save the VORT/ AND as the listed movements were precisely those criticized in BLAST of holy memOry, and as by chance the main VORTS opposed pinkismo from the beginning the coincidence shd/ be USED" (Lewis and Pound 302).
In this passage, Pound uses a term that had entered the world along with BLAST in the subtitle of the magazine: "Review of the Great English Vortex." Pound writes VORT and invokes the neologisms he himself had derived from the Vortex: Vorticism referring to the movement, and Vorticists to the artists who made up the group. Neither for the first nor for the last time in this radio show, Vorticism had been omitted from a list of avant-garde art movements. The reason for this exclusion may be that the First World War had erupted only a month after the declaration of Vorticism; as a result, the London avant-garde project never became as well known as other continental groups whose birth either...