Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) has long been regarded as the lost modernist. Her extraordinary long poem Paris (1920), a journey through a day in post First World War Paris, was considered by Virginia Woolf ‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’. Read today, the poem retains its exhilarating daring. Mirrlees’s experimentalism looks forward to The Waste Land; her writing is integral to the twentieth-century canon.

And yet, after Paris, Mirrlees published no more poetry for almost half a century, and her later poems appear to have little in common with the avant garde spirit of Paris. In this first edition to gather the full span of Mirrlees’s poetry, Sandeep Parmar explores the paradoxes of Mirrlees’s development as a poet and the complexities of her life.

Sandeep Parmar was the first scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form. The text is supported by detailed notes, including a commentary on Paris by Julia Briggs, and a selection of Mirrlees’s essays. The generous introduction provides the most accurate biographical account of Mirrlees’s life available. Mirrlees’s Collected Poems is an indispensible addition to a reading of modernism.

Julia Briggs OBE was Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University. Among her many influential publications were a biography of E. Nesbit and her acclaimed Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. She died in 2007.

Cover Painting Juan Gris (1887-1927), Breakfast, 1915. Oil on canvas. Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris / Peter Willi / The Bridgeman Art Library

Acknowledgements    vii
Introduction    ix
A Note on the Text    xlix
Select Bibliography    lii
Hope Mirrlees, ca. 1920    liv


PARIS: A POEM (1920)    1

MOODS AND TENSIONS (1976)
Mothers    21
The Copper-Beech in St. Giles’ Churchyard    22
The Death of Cats and Roses    24
A Skull    25
Et in Arcadia Ego    26
The Land of Uz    28
The Glass Tánagra    30
The Legend of the Painted Room    30
‘Une Maison Commode, Propre, et Belle...’    32
The Rendez-Vous    32
Bertha frightens Miss Bates    33
In a Pagan Wood    36
Sickness and Recovery at the Cape of Good Hope in Spring    37
Winter Trees    40
A Portrait of the Second Eve, Painted in Pompeian Red    43
Amor Fati    45
Heaven is Not Fairyland    45
Gulls    46
A Meditation on Donatello’s Annunciation in the Church
of Santa Croce, Florence    46
A Doggerel Epitaph for My Little Dog, Sally    51
Jesus Wept    52


PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
I’d like to get into your dreams    55
Crossed in Love    55
Love Lies Dying    56
To Mrs Patrick Campbell    57
To Jean, Who Loves Faerie-tales    58
The Moon-Flowers    59
Love    60
Carpe Diem    61
My Soul Was a Princess    61
The Moon-Maid    62
from My Mother’s Pedigree    63
The Faerie Changelings    64
‘Some talk of Alexander and some sing Monty’s praise’    65
A Friendship    66
The Shooting Stars    66
Ostia Antica    67
The Toad    67
The Invocation, by Anna de Noailles    68
Dusk, by Albert Samain    70

ESSAYS
Some Aspects of the Art of Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov (1926)    75
Listening in to the Past (1926)    85
An Earthly Paradise (1927)    90
The Religion of Women (1927)    94
Gothic Dreams (1928)    98
Bedside Books (1928)    102

NOTES AND APPENDIX
Abbreviations    112
Commentary on Paris, by Julia Briggs    113
Notes on the Poems and Essays    129
Appendix: ‘To Her. A twilight poem’, by Jane Ellen Harrison    138

Index of Titles and First Lines    141