ABSTRACT
Hugh Kenner argues that prior to the official date of Wyndham Lewis’s materialisation, it was within ‘the world of Dorian Gray and The Man Who Was Thursday’ that he ‘slowly came into possession of his powers’. Lewis and Ezra Pound had become acquainted in 1909, shortly after Lewis’s return to London from the continent and by 1910 they were beginning to plan their takeover of the British avant-garde, having identified Ford as the requisite mythologising patron-figure. Lewis’s revelatory disguises draw upon a strikingly comparable range of influences to those of T. S. Eliot, again flirting with the themes of the Chestertonian folk carnival before withdrawing into the trapdoor ironies of the Romantic grotesque. Excruciatingly conscious of potential criticism, Maud Ellmann becomes a compulsive self-satirist, while evincing an equally strong urge to parody others in turn. This duality is exemplified by the ‘hundred visions and revisions’ for which Prufrock finds time.
