Wyndham Lewis Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rachel Annand Taylor

Critical Essay by Rachel Annand Taylor

SOURCE: "Some Modern Pessimists," in The Spectator, Vol. 139, No. 5. December 17, 1927, p. 863.

In the following excerpt from an early review, Taylor finds the "noise and fury" of Lewis's satire in The Wild Body distasteful

In The Wild Body Mr. Wyndham Lewis finds matter for his savage mirth, his "beast of humour," in the more glaring towns of the Spanish border, and the more brutish spots of Brittany. . . . When he devotes his inordinate vocabulary of scorn to express his Timon-like hatred of mortality by conjuring up the bestial or preposterous figures that give him a painful joy, the noise and fury are too much for me, who fall to thinking with what deadly quietness Swift undertook the assassination of his kind. Mr. Lewis, that hater of the Romantics, here exhibits himself as a Romantic of the worst French kind in his taste for monsters....
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