SOURCE: "Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: The Crucial Years," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 4, Winter, 1968, pp. 72-89.

In the following essay, Rose examines the careers and friendship of Lewis and Pound from 1910 to 1920.

Of Ezra Pound's many and celebrated literary associations, that with Wyndham Lewis has the unique interest of showing the poet in close contact with the pictorial arts. It is special too in that Lewis, unlike Yeats or Eliot, saw a revolution in the arts as a public battle and shared the poet's zest for skirmishing. Viewed less narrowly, this relationship engages one's attention as would any other involving two dynamic human beings, both of them gifted artists and important influences in the cultural history of their epoch. For all of one's reservations about the "dangers of literary biography," of which Noel Stock warns in his book on Pound, I do not see...