Wyndham Lewis Quotes (15 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Blasting and Bombardiering

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis: 15 quotes0 likes

Famous Wyndham Lewis Quotes

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”

“Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.”

Wyndham Lewis

"Call Yourself a Man!"
The Art of Being Ruled (1926)

“Is it with us a compensatory fact that, being more stupid in the mass, we shoot up higher, when we do shoot up, in dazzling concentrations of intellectual power and so produce what we describe as "genius"? For "genius" is with us an individual thing. Whereas all Jews are little geniuses.”

Wyndham Lewis

The Jews, are they human? 1939, p. 68.

“1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.
2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind.
4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.
7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy.
8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.
9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.
10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.
11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.
12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.”

Wyndham Lewis

"Inferior Religions" (1917), cited from Lawrence Rainey (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) pp. 208-9.

“I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.”

Wyndham Lewis book Blasting and Bombardiering

Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937) p. 12.

“The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.”

Wyndham Lewis

"The Great God Flux".
Source: The Art of Being Ruled (1926), p. 336

Wyndham Lewis Quotes

“Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire.”

Wyndham Lewis

Notes to Kenneth Allott, as quoted in Contemporary Verse (1948) edited by Kenneth Allott
Context: Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.

“Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.”

Wyndham Lewis

“The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.”

Wyndham Lewis

America and Cosmic Man (New York: Doubleday, [1948] 1949) p. 21.

“Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall.”

Wyndham Lewis

The Hitler Cult (Dent, 1949)

“The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.”

Wyndham Lewis

"Beyond Action and Reaction".
The Art of Being Ruled (1926)

“I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. “The architectural simplicity” – whether of a platonic idea or greek temple – I far prefer to no idea at all, or no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE – even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome – that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start; though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of intelligent life. (p. 338)”