Collected Poems: Hope Mirrlees

In Paris & Other Poems Hope Mirrlees’s remarkable long poem Paris, originally published by the Hogarth Press is 1920, is published alongside later poetry, prose essays and previously unpublished work. Paris is now recognised as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’, a daylong, psycho-geographical flanerie through the streets and metro tunnels of post-World War I Paris. Virginia Woolf called Paris ‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’, and it has been suggested that Mirrlees experimentation with language and form had an impact on T.S. Eliot’s composition of The Waste Land. Half a century later she started to publish poetry once more, work strikingly different from Paris, more formal and restrained, but with a maturity of voice and mood and touching on her later themes, including Roman Catholicism. Until the mid-1990s, Mirrlees’s reputation as an early modernist poet was obscured by her cult status as author of the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). With this book she is back in the poetic limelight.