[4] As literary editor of The Twentieth Century, monthly magazine of the Promethean Society in the early 1930s,[5] he boosted the career of George Barker, about whom he wrote for Scrutiny.
[8] Lewis gave a public reading of his One Way Song in 1933 in Kensington Gardens, to an audience of Porteus and a flock of sheep.
[10] He wrote in a hostile way about Laura Riding; and he compared John Middleton Murry in 1933 to "a renegade freelance vicar", in Time and Tide.
He was included in the Cairo poets World War II group, having been stationed with the RAF on the Suez Canal (miserably seasick on the journey out).
[12][13] At the end of the war Ezra Pound, held prisoner, asked for Porteus to be given the work of checking the ideograms in the Pisan Cantos.