In this paper I question the long-standing tradition which has unambiguously assigned the phrase “American modernist poet” to Mina Loy.
Loy’s nomadic biographical narrative and her poetry belie such an ascription to American letters, notwithstanding her status in later life as an American citizen. Analyzing a few of her best-known poems (from the “Pound Era”), and highlighting the cultural critique underlying those poems, I suggest that the space in which Loy wrote and lived is ultimately the unclassifiable space of self-exile. In this paper I argue that the marginalized position that Loy’s poetry has been accorded, even in the American literary canon, may be attributed not only to the experimental nature of her poetry, and her detachment from literary circles, but also to her work of mapping feminist, rather than nationalist poetic boundaries.
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