Mina Loy, poet and painter, was a charter member of the generation that--beginning in 1912 with the founding of Poetry magazine--launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United States. Loy was too radical for Poetry's editor Harriet Monroe, who published her poetry only in a review article, but the generation's more innovative members admired her defiant honesty of subject and applauded the new directions she advanced for poetry. Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) remembered that in 1913 Mina Loy did not ask for the addition of commas when she read the manuscript for Stein's The Making of Americans (1925): "Mina Loy ... was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand." William Carlos Williams in his prologue to Kora in Hell (1920) divided the psychic landscape of New York's avant-garde into the Dionysian South of Mina Loy and the fastidious North of...