SOURCE: “Wyndham Lewis in the Modernist Canon: Dissent, Division, and Displacement,” in Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism, The University of Alabama Press, 1992, pp. 1-18.

In the following excerpt, Schenker declares that Lewis's politics and morality prevent him from receiving acknowledgement as a major cultural figure.

In a few lines of verse from his satiric self-portrait “If So the Man You Are,” Wyndham Lewis described with uncanny accuracy his place in English letters as it stood in 1933 and has continued to the present day:

I am an “outcast” and a man “maudit.” But how romantic! Don't you envy me? A sort of Villon, bar the gallows: but Even there I may be accommodated yet. Why yet it's very jolly to be picked As the person not so much as to be kicked, As the person who de facto is not there, As the person relegated to the back-stair. 

(CPP...