Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100

July 2, 2025 By: Nell Wasserstrom

In her editor’s note introducing the first 2022 print issue of Modernism/modernity, Anne Fernald reflects on anniversaries and new beginnings in light of this weightiest of modernist centenaries: “1922 was a special year and its advent is special to us, in part because it is an anniversary not of violence, but of artistic achievement. If we value art as a mode of resistance to violence and a way to make meaning out of loss, then anniversaries that are determined by art are important.” An anniversary determined not by violence, but by art: what better way to open a cluster marking the centenary of a modernist long poem dedicated to the “Peace Carnival” of Paris in 1919? Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, what Julia Briggs has irresistibly dubbed “modernism’s lost masterpiece,”

Hope Mirrlees, the Holophrase, and Colonial Linguistics

July 10, 2025 By: Juliette Taylor-Batty

“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...

“The Russian Trace”: Connecting Paris: A Poem to Russian Modernism

July 10, 2025 By: Sofia Permiakova

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...

Feminist Modernist Collaboration, Then and Now: Digitizing Hope Mirrlees’s Paris

July 10, 2025 By: Melanie Micir

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...

Plastic Paris

July 10, 2025 By: Matthew Kilbane

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):

Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Late-Colonial Collage

July 10, 2025 By: Davida Fernandez-Barkan

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...

A Cartography of Hope: Mirrlees and the Poetics of New Materialism

July 10, 2025 By: Ruth Alison Clemens

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...

Virgin Dolls, Ancient Tombs, and Modern Eyes: Hope Mirrlees and Mina Loy Writing Paris

July 10, 2025 By: Yasna Bozhkova

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...

Teaching the Aesthetics of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Life, Art, and Representation

July 10, 2025 By: Cornelia Wilde

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...

“Move Forward and Ascend!”​​​​​​​ Temporality and the Politics of Form in Turkish Modernist Literature

June 26, 2024 By: Kaitlin Staudt

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press This article addresses a phenomenon which literary critics frequently suggest might not exist: the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk programmatically claims: in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.” [1] Emphasizing stream of consciousness techniques, fragmented narratives, and a limited period of emergence, he points to a laundry list of modernism’s standard...

“Tokio Takes Over, Where Paris Stopped”: Kitasono Katué’s VOU

December 19, 2023 By: Andrew Houwen

When attention is paid to Japanese poetry in Anglo-American culture, it is overwhelmingly to what Hosea Hirata observes are considered “authentically ‘Japanese’ texts, such as haiku and waka.” [1] Modern Japanese poetry—and certainly modernist Japanese poetry—have long been relatively overlooked because of their perceived “inauthenticity” and the sense that Japanese responses to movements such as Imagism and surrealism were merely “a translation of Western texts” (Hirata, Poetics, 184)...

Neo-Avant-Garde Politics and Poetics from a Transnational Perspective: The Conversation between the Beats and Labris

August 14, 2023 By: Vincent Broqua

Although the Beats associated with the avant-garde and although “[scholars] understand the Beat Generation in terms of a literary avant-garde,” historically and from the perspective of forms and gestures, they had in fact repeated, distorted and sometimes mocked the avant-garde. [1] They may thus be defined as a neo-avant-garde. Peter Bürger describes the neo-avant-garde as a possible double failure: not only does it repeat the gestures of the avant-garde, which, according to him, failed, but by...

Post-Avant Translation Practices: Language Poetry in Austria & The Low Countries

August 14, 2023 By: Michel Delville

American Language poetry can be considered a neo-avant-garde movement, at least if we refer to Hal Foster’s definition of the term as the result of a “deferred action,” a later event that recodes the original (historical) avant-garde—e.g. Dada or Gertrude Stein—in a way that stresses “a continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” [1] This sometimes controversially labeled “post-avant”-poetry (a term promoted, among others, by...

Mina Loy’s Nomadic Politics of Pain

February 23, 2023 By: Joanna Mąkowska

Reading Loy in the twenty-first century, after the material turn in the humanities, sheds new light on her writing as particularly attuned to how the material and the incorporeal are embedded in each other. Perhaps today the question is no longer whether Loy’s poetics epitomizes the dance of the intellect or the dance of the body, but how it renegotiates intricate entanglements of mind and matter, spirit and flesh, or nature and culture. A “binarian’s nightmare,” as Roger Conover described her...

For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

October 27, 2022 By: Irina Markina

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry. Like a number of fellow poets, Apollinaire believed that within one to two centuries the record would replace the book as the preferred method for the dissemination of poetic texts. [1] However, for Apollinaire, the gramophone was not merely exterior or tangential to the poetic enterprise, a stance adopted by many Symbolist poets who nevertheless...

Miss Lowell Regrets

October 12, 2022 By: Melissa Bradshaw

Amy Lowell is tired. “This is a work, this poetry,” she writes Harriet Monroe in March of 1922, finalizing the poems she’ll have included in the 1922 version of Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry anthology. Lowell had published her eighth and ninth books the previous year, and would publish her tenth in ten years later that fall. She has pulled back on the rigorous lecturing schedule which has kept her away from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts and has had her crisscrossing the country the past several years.

Ruth Lechlitner’s Extinction Poetics 

October 7, 2022 By: Alex Goody

Other papers in this cluster illuminate how modernism and extinction are closely historically related, but my contribution here is specifically concerned with the utility of reading a poet—Ruth Lechlitner—who allows us to think about modernism and extinction along parallel tracks. Lechlitner’s work is attentive to extinction in diverse ways; her poetry confronts the extinction of human solidarity, the extinction of organic life by the machines of extractive capitalism, the extinction of our embeddedness, as human animals, in a multispecies ecology, and the global extinction threat of nuclear war.

“That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”: Hunting Bison in Modernist Caves

October 7, 2022 By: Holly Corfield Carr

In the autumn of 1941, David Jones is carving “bison in the caves of ice” into a hurried single-page fragment, one of the early “experiments” which would, a decade later, yield his late modernist epic poem The Anathemata. Before the final manuscript’s publication in 1952, both the bison and their ice caves will disappear from Jones’s drafts, their meltwater pooling in the footnotes where Jones anticipates the end of the world:
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