Mina Loy and Edward Thomas Flashcards
Mina Loy
visual and written artist born in England, half Hungarian left the UK to study art in GM at 17 on the peripheries of several art groups met the Italian Futurists, relationship with Giovanni Papinin
Edward Thomas
much more subtle killed 1917 escapist poetry interest in psychology and the artifice of language late Georgian/ early modernist
Ted Hughes
‘The father of us all’
Mina Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’
‘Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved -‘
‘the first and greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your “virtue” ‘
v violent language, like it’s shouting
Magasins du Louvre
no regular rhythm, rhyme or structure
‘All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass’ - refrain
‘Long lines of boxes/ Of dolls […] Huddled on shelves’
‘they alone have the effrontery to /stare through the human soul’
‘mine are inextricably tangled with the pattern of the carpet/ As eyes are apt to be/ In their sham/ Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate’
undigested quality
critique of relationships between men and women
women as commodities
Lovesongs to Johannes
horrified by subj matter and punctuation
Giovanni Papini
togopoeia - words for context and meaning
v satirical and angry, refer to science
I ‘Spawn of Fantasies’
I I must live in my lantern […] Virginal to the bellows/ Of Experience Coloured glass’
II ‘We might have coupled/ In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment […] At the profane communion table’
XIV ‘Only the impact of lighted bodies/ Knocking sparks off each other/ In chaos’
XXVI ‘We sidle up/ To Nature/ — that irate pornographist’
Brancusi’s Golden Bird
trying to find the nucleus of pure art
‘The toy/ become the aesthetic archetype’
‘has lopped the extremities/ of crest and claw/ from/ the nucleus of flight’
‘this gong of polished hyperaesthesia’
‘the immaculate/ conception/ of the inaudible bird/ occurs/ in gorgeous reticence…’
How I Began
artificiality of written language language above syntax not a manifesto power of literary heritage 'my masters often lent me dignity and subtlety altogether beyond my needs'
Digging I
4 quatrains
inadequacy of words
evocativeness of nature
‘Today I think/ Only with scents -scents dead leaves yield’
smell of smoke from a ‘bonfire burns/ The dead, the waste, the dangerous/ And all to sweetness turns’
‘While the robin sings over again/ Sad songs of Autumn mirth’
Lights Out
5 sestets
AABCCB rhyme scheme, iambic tetrameter (roughly)
dark, disturbing poem about the future/ death
alienation
‘I have come to the borders of sleep,/ The unfathomable deep/ Forest, where all must lose’
‘Here love ends -/ Despair, ambition ends’
‘Here ends, in sleep that is sweeter/ Than tasks most noble’
‘Its silence I hear and obey/ That I may lose my way/ And myself’
Swedes
12 lines, couplet and 10 line stanza
describes the swedes - ‘white and gold and purple of curled fronds’
a sight ‘more tender-gorgeous’ ‘Than when in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings/ A boy crawls down into a Pharoah’s tomb’ and sees ‘Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold’
‘This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring’
Christina Walter
Feminist manifesto = rejection of modernism’s impersonal aesthetic
Edna Longley
‘Few poets have been such a muse to other poets’
Poems carry ‘cultural and metaphysical freight […] Yet they carry it lightly’
Robert McCrum
Thomas - melancholy character, prone to depressions
