Mina Loy
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is best known for her formally and thematically innovative free verse, which appeared in little magazines in the 1910s and 1920s. She later distanced herself from this free verse movement, with which she was so strongly associated, claiming: My poetry had nothing to do with that movement. Instead, she turned to writing verse as one feels: I tried to forget that I had ever in my life read anything & see if I could let out that natural expression that must be innate to all mankind. In addition to her free verse,
wrote prose, including manifestoes, autobiography, and a novel, but very little of this was published during her lifetime. She also produced a wide range of visual art throughout her life; she asserted: The two, writing and painting, go together with me.
- BirthName: Mina Gertrude Lowy
- Self-constructed: Mina LoyHer biographer notes that offered many different explanations about why she adopted Loy as surname. She first used the name in 1904, shortly after her marriage to Stephen Haweis, when she exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. She once said that she used Loy instead of Haweis in a spirit of mockery, in place of that of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of England.Burke notes 's discomfort with her birth name and suggests that dropping the w allowed the spelling to match the pronunciation which her mother had adopted in an attempt to make the name sound less foreign. Other explanations from included that she had first seen the name on a shop in Munich; once she was living in Paris, she would say that she was a law (loi) unto herself.
- Married: Haweis; Lloyd