Loy’s careful depiction of young women waiting to marry and thus enter the world (who are prevented from doing so because they lacked dowries) indirectly, but powerfully, critiques marriage, patriarchy, and sexual norms. It was the gender identity of the poet and of the speaking voice, often coalesced by the critics into a single entity, to inform the critical judgment of Loy’s texts.” “Virgins Plus Curtains” was included in the Love Songs’ harsh assessment. In “Negotiating Boundaries: The Economics of Space and Gender in Mina Loy’s Early Poems” Laura Scuriatti writes “The publication of the first four Love Songs fuelled the harshest criticism, even amongst the patrons of the avant-garde, such as Amy Lowell, who threatened to withdraw her financial support to the magazine.

The poems’ thematic similarities are mediated by their stylistic differences, though both poets were challenged in their own time for their avant-garde forays, both facing criticism for their experimentation. The two portraits of women watching the outside world from positions of limited mobility chart the stories of three different eras, one of Emily Bronte (1818-1848), one of Mina Loy (1915), and one of Anne Carson’s female narrator/proxy for the author (a woman of the 1990s). By placing excerpts from Mina Loy’s 1915 poem “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” in conversation with “Whacher”, a section of Anne Carson’s narrative poem “The Glass Essay” (from her 1995 collection “Glass, Irony, and God”) I hope to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of themes explored in both works.

Anne carson glass