Mina Loy Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lisa Ress

Critical Essay by Lisa Ress

SOURCE: "From Futurism to Feminism: The Poetry of Mina Loy," in Gender, Culture, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society, edited by Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, Associated University Presses, 1993, pp. 115-27.

In the following essay, Ress determines the primary influences on Loy's poetry and discusses how she appropriated collage and other Futurist literary techniques to give her own work "violence and energy. "

In a 1921 letter Ezra Pound, that entrepreneur of modernism, asked Marianne Moore, "P.S. Entre nooz, is there anyone in America besides you, Bill [W. C. Williams], and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?" [The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, 1982]. Both he and Eliot considered Loy "the most radical of the radical set whose work began appearing" in avant-garde literary magazines of the period. In 1926 Yvor Winters, writing in The Dial, asked, "Who will...
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