[10] Writing to James Joyce in April 1914, Pound described the magazine in ambiguous terms: "Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly ...

[3] By July, the magazine had a name, a movement to support, and a typographic style, and it had forged a distinctly English identity, confident enough to praise Kandinsky, question Picasso,[11] and openly mock Marinetti.

[12][13][14] The opening twenty pages of Blast 1 contain the Vorticist manifesto, written by Lewis and signed by him, Wadsworth, Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, and Gaudier-Brzeska.

[16] Among the Blessed are seafarers because "they exchange...one element for another" (p. 22) and the hairdresser who "attacks Mother Nature for a small fee....[and] trims aimless and retrograde growths" (p. 25).

The English press was unimpressed by Blast, finding the literary contributions dull, and the artwork and typography a pale imitation of the Futurist style.

[18] Writing to Harold Monroe, Marinetti said he took the negative reviews as a “victory” for Futurism, but regretted there hadn’t been instead a collaboration with the Vorticists in the fight against “our great common enemy: attachment to the past.

"[19] The second edition, published on 20 July 1915, contained a short play by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's poems Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night.

Richard Cork writes: When Lewis returned from the trenches, he hoped to revivify the Vorticist spirit, planning a third issue of Blast and regaining contact with old allies.

But the whole context of pre-war experimentation had been dispersed by the destructive power of mechanized warfare, which persuaded most of the former Vorticists to pursue more representational directions thereafter.

[26] The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18 from 30 September 2010, through 2 January 2011.