SOURCE: "Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy," in Boundary 2, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Spring, 1980, pp. 167-88.

In the following essay, Kouidis discusses Loy's involvement with feminism, futurism, French metaphysics, and the free verse movement through a reading of several of her major works.

Although British by birth, Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been considered an American modernist poet since her arrival in New York in 1916. One of the European expatriates from World War I, she shared the glamour and notoriety accompanying this group's pursuit of artistic and personal freedom, and her exceptional beauty, cerebral disposition, and cosmopolitan background distinguished her among the artists surrounding avant garde impresarios Alfred Stieglitz, Walter Conrad Arensberg, and Alfred Kreymborg. This milieu provided a sympathetic audience for her daringly innovative poetry, and to its writers' experiments in word, line, and image she contributed her firsthand knowledge of European modernism. The American little magazines...