SOURCE: "Becoming Mina Loy," in Women's Studies, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-2, 1980, pp. 136-50.

In the following essay, Burke analyzes several of Loy's poems from the years 1914 and 1915 in order to show the poet "examining the traditional spaces in which women live their lives, defining her own place within the 'spatiality' of poetry, and shaping the contours of a new psychic terrain."

"images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind."

—Adrienne Rich

Mina Loy was an early explorer of that uncharted territory, the "new psychic geography" of women's poetry. Writing just before World War One, she felt the urgency of learning new ways to speak as a woman. Her poems are born of the desire to enter into a terrain where physicality embodies the spirit, where the body is animated by the mind. Appearing at the height of the first Women's Movement, her earliest work...