Caws, Mary Ann. Mina Loy: Apology of Genius

Abstract

On reading Loy’s fragmentary poetry, her status as a modernist poet might seem obvious. In Mina Loy: Apology of Genius, Mary Ann Caws argues that the poet was ‘desperately, irretrievably and movingly modern’, a ‘modernist being’ (pp. 1, 166). Yet, as Caws shows, Loy’s position in the modernist canon is still not affirmed. Indeed, Loy’s work only began to gain sustained critical attention in 1982 with the publication of her collected poems, The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover. More recent critical studies by Carolyn Burke and Tara Prescott, for instance, have gone some way to rectifying this, as Caws highlights, yet Loy has remained a name little known outside of academic circles. In this book, however, Caws succeeds in blending biography, literary and art criticism and even personal reflection to offer an accessible and engaging introduction to Loy’s life and work and, moreover, to celebrate the protean and shifting artistic and literary identities that Loy adopted. Caws intersperses her text with what she terms ‘intervals’, chapters in which she introduces figures who greatly influenced Loy, such as her second husband, Arthur Cravan, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, or the Futurist poet and theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of Caws’s main arguments is that Loy’s ‘Futurist past’ not only ‘left its traces everywhere, or almost [everywhere]’ in her work (p. 145), but evolved as a practice distinct from its founders: Loy ‘appropriate[d] Futurist vocabulary to mock Futurism’s […] chief ideologue’, Marinetti, employing satire to address themes such as ‘male posturing, female dependency, marital appearance, sexual repression, romantic love’ (p. 49). Although Caws highlights Loy’s feminism, she does not engage with the more problematic elements of her Futurism, such as her endorsement of eugenics.