Abstract

Since she was briefly championed as a 'logopoeic' writer by Ezra Pound in the early 1920s, Mina Loy has been depicted as a cerebral spinner of futurist and feminist fantasies (with a predilection for alliteration). This essay argues that such a characterisation underemphasizes the influence of the 'here and now' on her Italian period poems, be this the presence in her work of the very stones in the Florentine streets, or the shaping influence of her own actual relations with specific individuals, such as Giovanni Papini - the model for 'Joannes' in Loy's celebrated sequence of Songs.