prose bewitched

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

—Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry” (1925), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1959, edited by Melissa Kwasny.

Editor’s headnote: “Loy—promoter of futurism, feminism, and modernism—did not publish much criticism. Yet this essay, which appeared in Charm, a women’s fashion magazine, conveys the sense of literary life in New York in the middle of a revolution [modernism].