ABSTRACT
Porteus is author of ‘Wyndham Lewis: A Discursive Exposition’ (1932) and ‘Background to Chinese Art’ (1935). Samuel Hynes describes the Promethean Society as
an organization of young radicals that met to discuss politics, ‘sexology’, philosophy, religion, and art, and published its own journal, the ‘Twentieth Century’.… certainly the Promethean Society represented some definitive currents in the generation.… the eclectic politics, the faith in science, and the pacificism are all there, and give to the time a sense of disorganized good intentions that have not yet been exposed to reality.
The ‘Twentieth Century’ ran for two years, from March 1931 to May 1933. During that time it published some of the generation’s leaders, including Auden … Spender … and Michael Roberts, as well as an odd mixture of elders – Havelock Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, and Trotsky. And it caused enough stir to be noticed by the ‘Daily Express’ (‘250 Young Rebels Challenge the Whole World. Down with Everything. Marriage, Morals, Parliament’ the headline read). But in 1933 the notion that civilization could be saved by scientific research and eclectic radicalism was dead, and the journal and its Society were dead, too.
(‘The Auden Generation’, pp. 83–4)