[In considering the question of why Mina Loy is an American poet, it seems essential to consider three factors which link her to the American modernists.] First, in her awareness that the subjects and structures of English poetry in 1910 were inadequate to experience, Mina Loy anticipates the Americans in drawing upon French literature of the art-for-art's-sake tradition for the justification and practice of her poetic revolt. As justification it taught the supremacy of art and contempt for the bourgeois fear of the new. But as her satires of the tradition and her praise of artistic responsibility indicate, she condemns the pose of artistic alienation. Implicit in her poetry is the notion of the poet as seer—the poet of Emerson and Whitman—who guides the way to divine self-realization. Certainly her emphasis on the self harkens back to American romanticism although its origins are not necessarily American. In...