Home Issues Artistic and Literary Commitme This article explores issues of commitment in relation to the early writings of woman modernist Mina Loy It will be argued that it is not simply by way of her diverse aesthetic output, but also through the very instability of her poetic voice, that Loy troubles established narratives of modernist commitment, at once affirming and challenging the engagements of her male high-modernist peers and placing the performance, not the objectification, of the female body at the heart of her liberating aesthetic practice and sexual politics.
At the same time, a concerted and apparently contrary move—the desire to protect the artwork from the sullying elements of contemporary civilization—has also been observed: a commitment, then, to the championing of the art form for, and of, its intrinsic self.
Eliot famously phrased it in his review of Ulysses Ulysses Deeply committed to change, yet highly suspicious of the constraints any commitment might place on individual liberty, a staunch defender of artistic genius in her early years, but increasingly sceptical of the concept as she matured, Loy was, in Roger L.
Nobody seems to agree on who Mina Loy really is: a poet? A real poet? A great poet? A character? A feminist icon? A well-connected dilletante? A fashion plate? A nice little role model? A boho scam artist? A mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know psycho drama-vampire lampshade pimp? The self-obfuscation was such that by the s, rumour had it that Loy was not a real person but a forged persona. An increasingly institutionalized and male-dominated literary academy did nothing to stem the tide.
Thus, as Loy scholar Sara Crangle explains:. Engaging in love affairs with Italian Futurists F. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini in , Loy became, albeit fleetingly, an honorary Futurist herself. THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting. FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses. The living successor of that travesty of Man the Dummy Public originated by the Press, financed by the Capitalist:.
