Clothing and costume are among Denise Riley’s key metaphors, from the white ballet skirt and headdress of her “Liberty Belle” to the synthetic fabrics of poems like “Shantung”, “Rayon” and “Lurex.” [1] Riley’s sartorial metaphors are key to understanding the restless role-playing of Riley’s lyric “I”. Exploring the motif of “trying on” in Riley’s poems, I consider in particular how her sequence “A Part Song” performs a sort of elegiac fancy dress, “do[ing] the bereaved in different voices” and...

In 1954, Turkish poet Cemal Süreya published an unusual poem in one of the influential literary magazines of the period. “Gül” [Rose] describes a person’s psychic state as he wanders through a disorienting urban landscape. With its use of decontextualized imagery and striking reversals, this poem scandalized Turkey’s mid-century literary scene: I’m crying right in the middle of the rose As I die each evening in the middle of the street Knowing neither what’s ahead or behind me Sensing how your...

“I want a holophrase.” The opening of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris has provided a critical entry to this difficult poem for many critics and readers, ever since Julia Briggs’s notes informed us that the concept derives from Jane Harrison’s Themis. The central hope (and lack) expressed by the speaker’s “want” is echoed by the poem’s own search for a holistic mode of expression that can articulate the flâneuse’s full sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience of the city of Paris. The fundamental...

Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison’s interest and affection for the Russian language, literature, and Russian émigré authors is well documented—though hardly unusual for Britons during the First World War and the Russian Revolution. [1] Following 1917 and the turmoil of the civil war, Europe welcomed “an influx of artists and intellectuals” fleeing from these “seemingly apocalyptic events” (Schwinn-Smith, “Bears in Bloomsbury,” 121). These people were seen as an entry point into the tumultuous and...

When we teach Paris: A Poem, we find ourselves repeatedly facing the same pedagogical question: what do we want our students to see when we read this poem? Hope Mirrlees’s text is at once a personal, lyric exploration of post-war Paris and a work of printed visual art. It is a modernist long poem written by a single author as well as an example of the kind of feminist modernist collaboration possible in small, independent presses. When faced with a poem like this that showcases its intentionally...

Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up. [2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “giant sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):

By the fifth line of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, the author has already invoked advertisements for three different products. The “ZIG-ZAG” cigarette papers, “LION NOIR” shoe polish, and “CACAO BLOOKER” hot chocolate posters she mentions—presumably glued to the walls of the “NORD-SUD” metro line she names beforehand—are united not only by their commodity status, but also by the particular kind of imagery mobilized to promote their sale. The head of the “Zig-Zag man” that appeared on posters at...

The preface to Hope Mirrlees’s 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists sets forth a statement of aesthetics and reads like a seminal text of modernism. However, the novel was published in a limited run in 1919 and has never been reprinted. In the brief paratext, Mirrlees outlines a distinctively modernist and materialist conception of literature, the threads of which can be traced throughout her oeuvre. The preface begins: Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point...

Intertextual readings of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem have related it to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone,” and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Oliver Tearle’s recent study underscores the degree to which Paris anticipates The Waste Land, suggesting that “[i]f we did not know better, we would place Mirrlees’s poem later than Eliot’s, identifying it as one of a number of [its] imitations”; as he shows, Mirrlees came up with many similar...

Thinking of aesthetics with reference to the Greek term aisthesis as both sense perception and the theory of the nature and perception of art and beauty, I read and teach Hope Mirrlees’s Paris as a particularly aesthetically-minded and meta-reflexive modernist poem that addresses questions about the dynamics of life, art, and representation. While Paris textualizes and aestheticizes Parisian reality, some of the poem’s formal modernist techniques make it particularly open and responsive to other...