In October 1915, four months after Eliot's precipitous wedding to Vivien Haigh-Wood in a London registry office, Bertrand Russell wrote to the poet's mother, evidently trying to allay her fears about Eliot's marriage and career prospects:

Russell's remark was more prescient than he could have known: the year 1915 did prove to be a turning point in Eliot's outlook on poetry and poetics. The ‘vorticists’ to whom Russell alludes were members of a short-lived avant-garde group of poets and visual artists, led by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound: the latter coined the term ‘vortex’ as the ‘point of maximum energy, the radiant node or cluster … from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’. The Vorticist painters fused Cubist geometry with a Futurist emphasis on bodies and machines in motion: in the first issue of Lewis's Blast (July 1914), a 12-inch by 9-inch periodical whose texts were printed in oversize bold black type and bound in bright puce-coloured wrappers, England is ‘blasted’ for its allegiance to a stultified Victorian past, not to mention the country's cursed climate and other evils.