Vorticism was a specifically English literary and artistic movement. It originated with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and vorticist writing was published almost exclusively in Lewis’ journal Blast. Like futurism, Vorticism celebrated the technology and speed of modern society as an aesthetic, but did not emphasize speed and movement as strongly as the futurists. However, vorticism did engage in a celebratory vision of violent change similar to the futurists, and both Lewis and Pound were sympathetic to right-wing politics, though neither went as far as Marinetti and the Italian futurists’ sympathy for fascism.
"Page 1 of Vorticist Manifesto published in Blast 1" by Wyndham Lewis, 1914, London | Public Domain.
Vorticist writing, while marked by extreme sentiments and typographical experiments, was also often humorous and retained a sense of irony. Lewis envisioned poetry as a vortex, a fixed point or node, through which ideas rushed in and out. Combining stability and movement, vorticism was also influenced by the stasis of imagism, the simultaneity of cubism and the emotional strength and clarity of expressionism.
References
Chris Baldick. “Vorticism.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Bush, C. “Vorticism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 2012.
Edwards, Paul. Blast : Vorticism 1914-1918. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
Katy Hooper ; Dinah Birch. “Vorticism.” The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2012.
“Vorticism.” "Encyclopædia Britannica Online", Encyclopedia Britannica Inc, 2020.