A impressive concentration of subtle minds took place vhen Wyndham Lewis first met T.S.Eliot, who became a lifelong friend, in Ezra Pound's little triangular sitting room at 6 Holland Park Chambers in Kensington, early in 1915. Eliot had made the acquaintance of Pound only a few days before, when Pound had proudly shown him Lewis' Timon of Athens drawings. The tall sibylline figure, "his features of clerical cut," greeted Lewis, the first artist he had ever encountered, with his characteristically prim manner and fastidious speech. The bombastic Pound, disappointed by the studied reserve of Eliot, who was less confident than his new friends, adopted his hillbilly dialect (perhaps to amuse Lewis and soften Eliot, for all three men had spent their childhood in America) and intimated to Lewis: "Yor ole uncle Ezz is wise to wot youse thinkin. Waaal Wynd damn I'se telling yew, he's a lot better'n he looks!"

Lewis, a vital and versatile painter, novelist, critic, poet, philosopher, traveler, and editor of Blast, had founded the Vorticist movement and was completing his first novel, Tarr. Eliot soon discovered that Lewis was a brilliantly amusing talker with a powerful critical intelligence and an astonishing visual imagination. In his 1918 review of Tarr in the Egoist, he called Lewis, in a phrase that has become famous: "The most fascinating personality of our time.... In the work of Mr. Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man." In One-Way Song (1933) Lewis portrayed Eliot's stern features, pessimistic poetic voice, and lugubrious religious inclinations with affectionate irony:

I seem to note a Roman profile bland,