women’s poetry of the two world wars other. But Stein’s provocative questioning oftheexigencies of response in times of
political and military crisis is relevant to a reading of the work of the still relatively
marginal figures of Mina Loy and E. J. Scovell. Mina Loy’s sequence ‘Songs to
Joannes’ (1915–17), written in Italy in the early years of the First World War, is an
exploration of female sexuality through an oblique, fragmentary account of a failed
love affair. Scovell’s collectionShadows of Chrysanthemums(1944) explores themes
of domesticity, motherhood, and the natural world. Like Stein, neither poet seems
to write much ‘about’ war, and, like Stein again, that very indirection suggests new
kinds of distinctively female war poetries.
Mina Loy
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Mina Loy’s wartime work is an aggressively, self-advertisingly avant-garde poetry
the main topic of which is sex (she wrote to the critic Carl Van Vechten that she
knew ‘nothing about anything but life—& that is generally reducible to sex!’^6 ). It
developed its style and gained its focus through Loy’s relationships—intellectual
and sexual—with the Italian Futurists Filippo Marinetti and Giovanni Papini.
Living in an unhappy marriage in Florence in the years before 1914, Loy initially
responded to her encounter with the rhetorically adventurous and personally
extravagant Marinetti with ingenuous enthusiasm. Yet, as her poetry developed,
she began to register and explore the contradictions within Futurist theory and
practice. These revolved around a conflict between the celebratory modernism and
revolutionary aesthetics of the movement, and the deeply conservative forces of
aggressive and unproblematized masculinity, nationalism, and militarism that were
embedded within such apparently radical positions. A ‘love of danger and violence,
patriotism and war, the sole hygiene of the world’,^7 as Marinetti termed it in ‘The
Second Political Manifesto of Futurism’ (1911), underpinned the assault upon what
he saw as the moribund traditions of European art and politics. As Loy came to
realize, such passions allowed no space for the development of a distinctive female
contribution to the revolutionary programme.
Loy’s work attempted a polemical and poetic practice that harnessed the energies
and adventure of Futurism to an exploratory feminine politics. Her ‘Aphorisms on
Futurism’ (1914), for example, has much of the bombast, but none of the gendered
ferocity of Marinetti’s manifestos. ‘DIE in the Past / Live in the Future’^8 is orthodox
(^6) Mina Loy to Carl van Vechten, n.d., quoted in Carolyn Burke,Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina
Loy 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191.
Filippo Marinetti, quoted in G ̈unter Berghaus,Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion
and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 69.
(^8) Mina Loy, ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’, inThe Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 149.