[What] does "morality" mean to a poet? Obviously, it has little to do with behaving in accordance with a set of social standards. Nor is it necessarily concerned with the ascertainment of or instruction in what is good or evil…. It may have to do with religion, but if it does, religion is subsumed—witness T. S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It may have to do with patriotism, but in a subversive way—witness Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Lowell. But over and beyond these minor manifestations, morality, to a poet, means one thing and one thing only. Few poets of the 20th century came closer to it than did Mina Loy. (p. 133)

[Mina Loy's] independence was largely misunderstood and misinterpreted, although it was recognized as an essential ingredient of the peculiar power of her poetry. She could not be dismissed—though Harriet Monroe, of Poetry, which never...