Mina Loy

While some poets develop a mature style and single area of creativity that remains relatively consistent for the rest of their lives, Mina Loy engaged in a variety of types of art, many of them influenced to some degree by her location in London, Paris, Florence, New York, and Berlin. Loy influenced the early development of modernist poetry through her radical attention to women's sexuality and to sexual double standards that hypocritically prize female sexual purity or ignorance while admiring male knowledge and experience in all fields, and through her innovative experiments with the poetic line and the mixing of language styles and registers. Loy's early poems and plays were satirical, representing men and women in relationships that emphasized the extreme differences in biological experience and cultural restriction that defined the contours of feminine propriety and female agency at the time, with specific reference to the "Latin Borghese" or "bourgeois".