simonfeatherstone
of the process of procreation that has haunted the affair (‘Proto-plasm was raving
mad|Evolvingus’),^27 and the veteran of ‘Der Blinde Junge’ is not redeemed from
horrors by his music. As Thom Gunn has suggested, Loy was a hard woman—as she
put it herself, ‘rather pugnacious’.^28 Hers was a hardness that produced war poetry
outside the borders of the male genre or of any later process of a critical ‘recovery’
of women’s war writing. She was an extremist. ‘Men & women are enemies’, she
wrote in ‘Feminist Manifesto’. But, as the polemic goes on to suggest, such enmity is
performed through passionate engagement, not emotional withdrawal or ultimate
accommodation: ‘The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the
sexual embrace.’^29 Her tough, oblique war poetry is a product of such ‘carnage’
in all its implications, and of a testy aesthetic committed to an uncompromising
examination of the personal consequences of war for women.
E. J. Scovell
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••E. J. Scovell’s collectionShadows of Chrysanthemums(1944) is in many ways very
different from Loy’s sequence, in terms of both poetic strategy and subject-matter.
As Peter Scupham puts it, Scovell wrote with ‘a reticent candour, a clean exactitude
of phrasing, a most observant eye and a warm heart’^30 —none of which can be
said of Loy. The poetry is scrupulous in form and modest in its range, consisting
mostly of lyrics that return to favourite scenes and objects: flowers, light, domestic
interiors, family, and nature in an urban landscape. Detailed observation forms
the basis for slow meditation and the drawing-out of implication. Like Loy’s and
Stein’s work, though, her poems’ insistence upon the intimate and the ordinary, and
their inattention to the public rhetoric of wartime are instructive. Few are readily
identifiable as ‘war poetry’—Catherine Reilly selects only one four-line piece from
Shadows of ChrysanthemumsinChaos of the Night.‘Home,houseandhousehold,the
domus, are where her imagination starts,’^31 Scupham suggests; but, whilst Scovell’s
household might be very different from those of the older modernists, like them she
uses its enclosed world to map a new sense of the places and experiences of wartime.
Two recurring themes ofShadows of Chrysanthemumssuggest how this war
poetry is developed—a series of ‘still lives’ about cut flowers (one of which gives
the collection its title) and a set of poems about marriage and children. ‘The Azalea
by the Window’ is the first of the flower poems. It is typical of the careful domestic
(^27) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, 67.
(^28) Thom Gunn, ‘Three Hard Women: H. D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy’, inShelf Life: Essays,
Memoirs, and an Interview(London: Faber, 1993), 33–52; Mina Loy, ‘Interview with Paul Blackburn
and Robert Vas Dias’, in Shreiber and Tuma (eds.), 29 Mina Loy, 207.
Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’, 154.
(^30) Peter Scupham, ‘E. J. Scovell’,PN Review, 26/3 (Jan.–Feb. 2000), 26. (^31) Ibid. 28.