Mina Loy’s Modern Long Poem: New York and the Compensations of Poverty

Abstract

AbstractModernist poet Mina Loy composed a series of poems in and about lower Manhattan during the late 1930s and into the 1940s, which she listed together in her notes under the title Compensations of Poverty. The poems, however, have never been collected or analyzed together as a group for their relationship to each other. The archival drafts of the poems, along with the published versions of poems, suggest that they be understood as a conscious grouping much like the long poems Loy’s modernist contemporaries were producing at the same moment in literary history. Taken together as one long poem comprised of various lyrics, this text focuses on figures and spaces typically marginalized by the workings of urban modernity: the homeless, children, and even insects who reside in the Lower East Side of New York. Loy’s Compensations of Poverty links seemingly different female figures to interrogate economic and spiritual value in the cityscape, suggesting finally that the poet figure serves as the force of transformation from an impoverished landscape to a divine one.