Mina Loy (1882-1966)

Beautiful and intelligent cosmopolitan, polyglot author scandalous erotic verses, biting satires and elegies destructive, progressive inventor creative painting fantasies and artistic designs, all embodied Mina Loy. As one of the protagonists of the European-American modernism Mina Loy much on intellectual and cultural exchange all major avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century was involved. Within a decade (about 1915-1925), she gained a reputation as an emancipated woman, more so an almost legendary figure, "Who, if not, is the modern woman," proclaimed the New York Evening Sun in 1917 and rose the writer and artist to the rank of a female prototype of the modern age.

Of the art training in Victorian London, where Mina Loy was born in 1882, towards the artistic circles of Munich at the end of the 19th Century, from the Parisian studio of the bohemians in Montparnasse in the futuristic Florence, and finally of the New York avant-garde of the 1910s back to the Paris of the Lost Generation - based on their life and work stations can be an almost complete picture of all artistic and literary significant international movements of the first half of the twentieth century stand. Your name appears in the written testimonies intellectual protagonists of that time, who loved and appreciated Mina Loy, from William Carlos Williams about Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and TS Eliot. She took her portraits by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, with whom she had a more than forty-year friendship admired her compositions. Joyce, Freud, Brancusi, Jules Pascin and also Marinetti and Papini were their model. The two Italians, with whom she stood during their Florence stay in contact, they should ultimately inspire humorous caricature Verssatiren. Between 1907 and 1916, Mina Loy lived in Florence and started here at futurist influence post her first poems. So they transferred the picturesque theories Umberto Boccioni in verses while their linguistic experiments definitely have bonds of elements and principles of the Italian avant-garde literature. In Florence, they also started on her rhyme book Lunar Baedeker, which should be the only one in her literary oeuvre to work. The 1923 edition, published in France is the only of the author herself, edited edition. This was followed by three more runs of text versions and with additions, which rather the bandwidth of Mina Loy's literary production to illustrate the forties. In that time dating her last poems, as Loys literary activity should focus from then on throughout the writing of (hitherto largely unpublished) autobiographical novels allegorical character.
Her poetry can be regarded as an intimate journey into the inner worlds of imagination and the unconscious, an expedition entirely under the sign of the feminine of celestial bodies, the Moon (Italian: la luna), an image which dominated their verses from the start, as well as the title of her first book is (Lunar Baedeker). In parallel, Mina Loy drew an unusually passionate portrait of the modern artist in her own unique elliptical-picturesque and onomatopoeic language that represents their personal legacy and contribution to the literature of the avant-garde of the twentieth century. The new English-language poetry, she wrote herself in an essay, have evolved beyond the ocean and not in the country of origin, because only in the streets of Manhattan, and not London, oscillates each "voice in the triad of race, nationality and personality" . That English in order to preserve it, the professors of Oxford so tried, solve entirely on the American melting pot, only to be recombined reborn "as unclassifiable speech" in modern literature, lively and sparkling like jazz in the rhythm of contemporary lifestyle. Pound or Williams for they embodied the modern poet par excellence, who was able to create poetic tone in the form of a "map of temperament" and then the emotion and "movement of a personality at the moment inner and outer expression" map.
The short poem Songs to Joannes, which in 1917 due to its bold theme - is the allegorical description of a sexual relationship - caused a scandal in New York, is considered without doubt Mina Loy's masterpiece and must be one of the key works of modernist poetry.

Cited Literature:

Francini , Antonella: Antologia della poesia americana (Biblioteca di Repubblica, Poesia straniera, 15), Rome 2004.