Writing from Rapallo in 1924, Ezra Pound waxed nostalgic to his comrade the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, reminiscing about a moment a decade earlier when he and Lewis had converged in London's avant-guerre artistic milieu. In 1914, Pound and Lewis had both been members of the newly emergent avant-garde movement of vorticism, known chiefly for its paintings – which featured a bold, angular, dynamic version of the geometric abstract idiom prevalent in the visual arts of the early twentieth century – but also involving sculpture, literature, and photography. Lewis had spearheaded the movement; Pound had joined it in mid 1914.

In his retrospective letter, Pound recalled Blast, the short-lived periodical (1914–15) that had served as vorticism's official organ and housed its manifestoes. A foot in height, with a bright puce cover stamped with aggressive black sans-serif lettering, Blast sported an outlandish visual code that signaled avant-garde defiance and mischief – and, as Paige Reynolds notes, that resonated with the visual signatures of advertising of the climate. Lewis would later fondly remember Blast as “that hugest and pinkest of magazines.” The magazine's contents – including hyperbolic manifestoes “blasting” Victorianism in gigantic type; geometric paintings; a phantasmagoric avant-garde play by Wyndham Lewis entitled Enemy of the Stars, ventured as an example of literary vorticism – sustained the audacity signaled by the magazine's bibliographic code.