Three Neglected Poets

It seems, a Chinese friend of mine has said, that the English speaking people learn to write before thay learn to read;  and, when one contemplates the mass of printed matter that issues daily from the presses of our land of nearly one hundred percent literacy, one may be inclined to believe that even before they learn to write, Americans learn how to get themselves published. At any rate, it is now much more than  a mere possibility that one days rush of print may suffice to bury alive  as the old phrase goes some of the most lovely talent of our day.

Of course it may be objected that really lovely talent must prove itself by producing such things as the world cannot willingly let die.It may perhaps seem to some that the three neglected poets we mean to treat in this paper have yet to give such proof of themselves.Mine is but a faint voice crying out against such a judgement.Mina Loy,Louis Zukofsky and Parker Tyler have proved themselves in verse though they have fallen short in their efforts to keep themselves in the public eye.Pity the artists and poets in an age that will not hear of them if they are too modest to do their own legwork or blow their own trumpets.

Not that our three poets have been without their heralds and criers.It is simply that they have not pressed their initial advantage.Of Mina Loy for instance, Kenneth Rexroth has written , “At one time it was common to couple the names of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore.Pound treated them as equals… There is no question but what she is important and should be reprinted” Sir Herbert Read says of Zukofskys measuring – rod and i know of no better.” In reviewing Parker Tylers Granite Butterfly,William Carlos Williams states,”The possibility of a poems being written in America , a major poem taking its context from direct experince, has been forwarded by Tylers poem.”

We do not mean to plead for them in this brief notice.The bits of their poetry printed here will evoke the readers praise by their own power.Our task will be merely to provide some necessary background  nad to betray if we cannot help it, our shemeless delight in this labor of love.

Mina Loy an English woman spent most of her years in Paris , London, and New York.Last year in the quiet town Aspen , Colorado, she celabrated her seventy-fifth birthday,undeservedly unnoticed.

Miss Loy is not a technical master of verse but her clean direct lines more than compensate for any lack of mechanical control.She doesnt make she hears her poetry and this enables her to achieve a beauty truly original.