T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis: 1914-1922

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between T. S. Eliot, the greatest modernist poet, and Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist novelist-painter, during the years 1914-1922. The fact that the portrait T. S. Eliot (1938) is undeniably the masterpiece of Lewis acclaimed as the equal of da Vinci in his time reveals the close interaction of the two writers. This paper mainly focuses on excavating numerous letters both in The Letters of T. S. Eliot 1 (2009) and in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (1963), touching upon Blast edited by Lewis and The Criterion by Eliot, furthermore upon Vorticism and modernism. Moreover, Eliot’s review “Tarr” (1918) on Lewis’s Vorticist novel Tarr (1918) and his brief adaptation of it in the modernist masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) reveals their intimate mutual relationship and strong influential interplay. This study will further elucidate the relationship between Eliot and Lewis during the years 1923-1925.