1st Edition

Wyndham Lewis Collected Poems and Plays

Edited By Alan Munton, Wyndham Lewis Copyright 2004

    At the beginning of his career Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) wrote vigorous poetry, and plays which in their form and vehement characterisation resemble the later work of Samuel Beckett. This volume includes major works: One-Way Song , and Enemy of the Stars in its two very different versions, as well as other writings that can now be seen as central to the formation of Lewis's work. The plays and poems crackle with ferocious energy, concentrated and brilliant, as Lewis creates a literary equivalent to the visual revolutions of Cubism and Vorticism. He explores how an artist should think and write in an oppressive world, the relationship between imagination and action. This edition, with Alan Munton's annotations, is a definitive text based on Lewis's own final corrections. An introduction by C.H. Sisson places these radical works in the context of Lewis's other writings.

    Contents
    Acknowledgements
    Introduction by C. H. Sisson
    POEMS
    Grignolles
    One-Way Song
    PLAYS
    Enemy of the Stars (1914)
    The Ideal Giant
    Enemy of the Stars (1932)
    Physics of the Not-Self
    APPENDIX: Unpublished poems and fragments
    The liquid borwn detestable earth
    The life of memory concerned me next
    Explanatory Notes
    Textual and Bibliographical Notes
    Bibliography

    Biography

    Alan Munton published an essay on Wyndham Lewis in the first number of PN Review in 1976, and his edition of the Collected Poems and Plays appeared in 1979. He has written influential essays, articles and reviews on Lewis, and on twentieth-century fiction and poetry. He is editor of the Wyndham Lewis Annual. A full-length study, Wyndham Lewis and the Idea of the Twentieth Century, is in preparation. Alan Munton teaches English at the University of Plymouth.