"Parsimonious / Presentations": Mina Loy's Crisis of [Christian] Representation

For poet Mina Loy, Christian visual culture posed unique and critical complications to the "crisis of representation" that she and her modernist peers attempted to negotiate. In poems featuring Christian iconography, Loy engages directly with high modernist theory, most prominently with Ezra Pound's injunction in "A Retrospect" to employ "Direct treatment of the thing." This paper situates two of Loy's poems, "The Prototype" and "Christ's Regrettable Reticence," as problematizing Pound's "direct treatment" in order to render spaces for Christian representations that remain accessible yet do not elide the distance she deems necessary between humanity and the divine.